roman opałka and our journey towards infinity

We want what we do not have. One thing I don’t have is an aptitude for commitment, and as such I find myself obsessed with artists who have decided to commit themselves to a single project for the entire duration of their lives. Roman Opałka is one such artist.

Roman Opałka does not have a large portfolio. Upon his death in 2011, he had spent 46 years working on only one project — one that earned him a spot in France’s Order of Arts and Letters, the Goslarer Kaiserring, and several other prestigious artistic awards from around the world. For a project described as “conceptual art,” it is conceptually quite simple. Opałka decided in 1965 that he would paint every number in gray, from one to infinity. Each time he ran out of space, he would get a new canvas.

There would be slight changes in Opałka’s process from time to time. In 1968, he began taking a black-and-white selfie against his current canvas at the end of each day. In 1972, he began to add one percent more white to his gray mixture every single year. But these changes did not change the core of the project. For over four decades, Opałka’s daily routine was to wake up and continue painting infinity. You may think this a strange project to dedicate one’s entire life towards. You wouldn’t be alone. From the Economist’s obituary:

“Some critics saw his project as a sort of suicide, and he did not altogether dispute that. No sort of afterlife tempted him, he had no belief in one; but he very much liked a story by Marguerite Yourcenar in which a man built a boat and set out into infinity.”

It is not unreasonable to ask why someone would begin an endeavor like this, but as his numerous awards demonstrate, I am not the only one that has been totally enraptured by Opałka’s work. I first learned about Opałka and his work from Jacob Geller’s video essay “The Shape of Infinity,” where he talks about Opałka’s project at length. Since I originally watched the video, I often think of Opałka when I find myself grappling with the question of art’s purpose.

I am a chronic analysis-paralysis victim. If there was a field of study about needlessly agonizing over minutiae, I would be a tenured professor at Harvard by now. Because of this, I find myself approaching Opałka’s project with a kind of religious reverence. It is difficult for me to even imagine the kind of total spiritual commitment nesscessary to begin a project that is not only impossible to complete in a human lifetime, but a project that is impossible to complete period.

No account of Opałka that I have read has even suggested that he ever thought about stopping, nor do they have any coverage of his work outside of his march toward infinity, which is likely because Opałka stopped working on any other projects in 1970. This was not a passive choice, either. On his own website, his decision to concentrate exclusively on the infinity project is specifically enumerated as an event in his life — listed as a point of pride alongside many of the numerous prizes the project earned that same year.

It is a well-worn cliché that art is a path to immortality, but in this case, I do imagine Opałka as a kind of demigod, a spirit that represents our autonomy in deciding what our lives should be lived for. I find myself drawing upon his self-assured determination when I find myself contemplating whether what I create — or who I am — is “enough.” Despite its conceptual simplicity, Opałka’s project has a bold and uncompromising answer to that question: it doesn’t matter. As his obituary in the Times puts it, the project is a “grand metaphor for human existence.” We are all just painting numbers, and that’s okay. Opałka was one of a rare few willing to admit it.