This renowned series created over more than fifty years by Roman Opałka (Abbeville-Saint-Lucien, France, 1931 – Rome, 2011) is heavily connotated by the factor of time. Time represents the series’ subject and the fulcrum of the artist’s reflection, also involving its consequent movements and actions. Opałka stated: “All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity.” The artist’s canvas becomes an interval in which space and time seem to coincide, canceling each other. In the exhibited tryptic, the rigorous and inflexible numerical sequence – belonging to the uninterrupted flow of works created between 1965 and 2011 with increasingly lighter colors – has reached the state of white-on-white and appears as a thin texture unfolding in the barely visible discrepancy between figure and background.
Roman Opałka