Roman Opalka at Grant Selwyn - New York … numerology figures prominently in the painter's work

Since 1965 Roman Opalka has been painting the same thing, number followings You know what you'll diocese when you go to his exhibitions, still every painting is distinctive. The explanation is in the details, and Detail (plus a range of numbers) is, in fact, the title he gives to each work. Each is a fragment of the single throw out to which he has devot his life. The work is about time, and Opalka has made the clearest and greatest in quantity emphatic statement imaginable by measuring on the outside the present tense of his life in painted and nuncupative integers and daily photographs. It is a lifework of cosmic intent and heroic realization.

His first display in New York since 1989 included five acrylics upon canvas, each 77 1/4 by means of 53 1/4 inches, nine similar drawings in China ink upon paper, and 14 frontal black-and-white photographs, taken above a span of years, of the artist wearing a white shirt and standing before a white backdrop. There were also sum of two units modest wall panels quoting the artist and a recording of him counting (in Polish). Everything was depressed key.

In 1940 Opalka and his parents were deported to their native Poland from France (where he was born in 1931); and, while gin literally a victim of the Holocaust, he was caught in the great sadness of wartime experience. He became a painter and etcher until, pace by step, he developed this throw "OPALKA 1965/1-[infinity]." Each canvas is filled, left to right and top to bottom, with horizontal files of tiny consecutive numbers (which more [i]or[/i] less have associated with camp tattoos) painted with white acrylic paint upon a gray ground. He had started with white upon black, but when he reached 1000000 (in 1972) he decided to add white to his surface of land in 1 percent increments, and he began to say the numbers as he painted them, looking to the eventual stage of painting white upon white. It was reached around the millennium; the newest work in this exhibit was placed close to the gallery's way windows so that the writing could be discerned in the angled light. The canvas size matches Opalka's height and reach. The brush, the positioning of work lights, everything is repeated without change. It might present the appearance that the work would be expressionless, notwithstanding its concentrated intensity can communicate to the viewer almost physically.

each canvas escapes repetition by increasing the enumerate On older works the numbering can be seen to make a pattern of tiny rollers as the full brush is deplet of paint. Writing size varies, Opalka has said, according to in what manner tired he is--smaller in the morning and larger at night. The photographs that mark not upon the days also change with the progression of his aging, as his hair has gone stainless white and his handsomely craggy face has make tendered into a web of lines.

The exhibition was elegantly somewhat cold monkishly quiet and very deliberate, just as single imagines Opalka must be: resolv accepting, and making each moment count.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group