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Lot Essay
French artist Roman Opalka has been exclusively painting "time" since 1965. His paintings do not use symbols, clocks or calendar dates, but rather a sequence of numbers, counted in his native Polish tongue, to represent the passing of time. Each painting is more or less the same; canvas size as well as text or digit size never changes. Each painting is finished in one day, and upon its completion Opalka photographically records his face and phonetically records the event on a tape recorder. The present lot dates from the first year of the artist's lifelong project.
"In my attitude, which constitutes a program for my lifetime, progression registers the process of work, documents and defines time.
Only one date appears, 1965, the date when the first "detail" came into being, followed by the sign of infinity, as well as the first and last number of the given "detail".
I am counting progressively from one to infinity, on "details" of the same format ("voyage notes" excluded), by hand, with a brush, with white paint on a grey background, with the assumption that the background of each successive "detail" will have 1 more white than the "detail" before it. In connection with this, I anticipate the arrival of the moment when "details" will be identified in white on white" (Opalka, quoted in Opalka 1965/1-8, Munich 1980, unpaged).
"In my attitude, which constitutes a program for my lifetime, progression registers the process of work, documents and defines time.
Only one date appears, 1965, the date when the first "detail" came into being, followed by the sign of infinity, as well as the first and last number of the given "detail".
I am counting progressively from one to infinity, on "details" of the same format ("voyage notes" excluded), by hand, with a brush, with white paint on a grey background, with the assumption that the background of each successive "detail" will have 1 more white than the "detail" before it. In connection with this, I anticipate the arrival of the moment when "details" will be identified in white on white" (Opalka, quoted in Opalka 1965/1-8, Munich 1980, unpaged).