The show at Dominique Lévy is Roman Opalka’s first U.S. exhibition after the artist’s sudden death in 2011. Divided between two floors of the gallery’s Upper East Side brownstone building, Roman Opalka: Painting ∞ provides a synopsis of the artist’s career by showcasing over twenty five works in different media. Although Opalka’s art may at first appear modest, this show proves its uniqueness and complexity. By focusing on the artist’s inimitable technique, Roman Opalka: Painting ∞ offers insight into his scrupulous and orderly approach to Conceptual art.
Opalka, who was born in France but raised and educated in Poland, began his artistic career in Warsaw during the late 1950s by experimenting with the “phenomenon of disappearance.”[1] The gallery’s third floor, devoted entirely to Opalka’s earlier works, presents the effects of these experiments with two of his 1963 black-and-white Chronome paintings and the series Étude sur le Mouvement (1959-1960), made with black ink on paper. As one walks around the room, the artworks reveal themselves as precursors to Opalka’s later work in their conscientious method of execution and monochromatic aesthetic. The smudges of ink in Étude sur le mouvement, though visibly influenced by gestural works of the American Abstract Expressionists and their European counterparts, the Tachists, reveal his fascination with repetitive patterns. Across the room, two tempera paintings from 1963, Chronome II and Chronome IV, present an intertwining of black and white spots, creating a nearly monochromatic surface.
The exhibition continues on the second floor with Opalka’s famous and quixotic attempt to capture infinity in the series titled 1965/1 — ∞ Détails. With the use of acrylic paint, he had — from 1965 until 2011 — painted over five million consecutive numerals on over 233 black, gray, and white large canvases. He began with a black background in 1965, switched to gray in 1968, and eventually began to increasingly brighten the works by adding an additional one percent of white paint for each new canvas. Opalka then recorded, in his native Polish, the painted numbers on a tape recorder and, after the work was completed, took a photograph of his face. A deliberate, systematic, yet futile attempt to define and confine infinity had become Opalka’s artistic trademark by the late 1960s, warranting him a significant position within Conceptual art.
The room devoted to Détails is a sensory experience. Though only twelve of the original 233 Details paintings are on display here, it is still enough to grasp Opalka’s artistic progress. Wall text, while concise, presents excerpts from critical essays and Opalka’s own memoirs, both of which tackle the issue of existentialism in the artist’s work. Nine photographs of Opalka’s face and an audio recording, played continuously in the background, augment the room, making the viewer feel almost confined by the artist’s idealistic attempt to defeat time. As the numbers of Opalka’s paintings increase and the canvas turns to white, the impossibility of reaching infinity becomes evident, soliciting reflection upon the finite nature of human existence.
Although compact, Roman Opalka: Painting ∞ successfully elucidates the creative process behind one of Conceptualism’s most methodical artists. The monochromatic, assiduously executed works create a sense of refined dominance, recognizing two universally imperative qualities that Roman Opalka’s art embodies: force and persistence.
[1] Dominique Lévy, Roman Opalka: Painting ∞, New York: Gallery Press Release, 2014.
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