In 1965, Opalka set out to visualize the continuum of time by embarking on an ambitious project: counting to infinity. He adhered to a disciplined process, writing numbers on canvases of identical size using white paint on a dark background. Each brushstroke was made until the paint was depleted, resulting in a subtle, irregular rhythm across the paintings. A shift occurs in Opalka's work starting in 1972, when he reached one million. The artist begins adding 1% more white to the background of each new canvas, causing the numbers to gradually and visibly fade from the surface, creating a visual chronology—the lighter the background, the later the work in the sequence. While painting, he recorded his voice reciting the numbers, and at the end of each workday, he took a photographic portrait of himself following an unchanging setup. By the time of his death, the series comprised 233 canvases. Opalka's final number painted was 5,607,249. By embracing this meticulously systematic approach, Opałka positioned himself alongside contemporaneous artists such as Daniel Buren, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven, who similarly explored the creation of art using systems and mathematics.

OPALKA AT WORK ON HIS INFINITY SERIES

While each painting might appear complete, it was merely a fragment of the larger endeavour. Paradoxically, the project's inherent impossibility to reach its goal was what defined its completion: Opalka found the ultimate conclusion of his work in its perpetual incompleteness (“The process is endless, but measured against its goal—infinity—it is as naught: the problem is that we are, and are about not to be. My death is the logical and emotional proof of the completion of my work.”). Beginning in the top left corner and ending in the bottom right, the tiny numbers are meticulously painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, referred to by the artist as a “detail,” continues the numerical sequence from where the previous one concluded. Every "detail" is identical in size (196 x 135 cm), matching the dimensions of the artist’s studio door. All the works share the same title: 1965 / 1 – ∞, and are intentionally undated, as the artist dedicated his entire life to their creation: “All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life”.

When he was not in his studio, Opalka continued his work on paper with Indian ink on paper (A4 format)(Christophe Domino, Contemporary Art: In the Collection of the Musée National D'art Moderne at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, Paris, 1999, p. 57). The present work belongs to this category, that the artist called “Cartes de voyage”, which, he explains “were a necessity during the time I was still living in Poland—that is to say, in a system where freedom was not comparable to what we have now, like here today, including in Poland. If I ever had the opportunity to travel somewhere in the world—usually to the West, which was not an easy thing given such a process—I had to find a way to continue my work. Because back then, traveling wasn’t like today, where you can go to Bordeaux and maybe return the same evening or the next morning. If I was in New York, West Berlin, or Paris, I would take the opportunity to stay for several months. That was the necessity of the travel cards” (translated from an interview published in Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, Les années 70 : de l’expérimentation à l’institutionnalisation, Bordeaux, 2006, p. 80).
DETAIL – CARTE DE VOYAGE 1660846-1664205

Opalka’s works are part of the permanent collections at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.