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 sequences. You know what you'll see when you go to his exhibitions, yet 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 project to which he has devoted his life. The work is about time, and Opalka has made the clearest and most emphatic statement imaginable by measuring out the present tense of his life in painted and spoken integers and daily photographs. It is a lifework of cosmic scope and heroic realization.

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

In 1940, Opalka and his parents were deported to their native Poland from France (where he was born in 1931); and, while net literally a victim of the Holocaust, he was caught in the great sadness of wartime experience. He became a painter and etcher until, step by step, he developed this project, "OPALKA 1965/1-[infinity]." Each canvas is filled, left to right and top to bottom, with horizontal rows of tiny consecutive numbers (which some have associated with camp tattoos) painted with white acrylic paint on a gray ground. He had started with white on black, but when he reached 1,000,000 (in 1972), he decided to add white to his ground in 1 percent increments, and he began to say the numbers as he painted them, looking to the eventual stage of painting white on white. It was reached around the millennium; the newest work in this show was placed close to the gallery's street 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 seem that the work would be expressionless, yet its concentrated intensity can communicate to the viewer almost physically.

Every canvas escapes repetition by increasing the count. On older works the numbering can be seen to make a pattern of tiny surges as the full brush is depleted of paint. Writing size varies, Opalka has said, according to how tired he is--smaller in the morning and larger at night. The photographs that mark off the days also change with the progression of his aging, as his hair has gone pure white and his handsomely craggy face has softened into a web of lines.

The exhibition was elegantly cool, monkishly quiet and very deliberate, just as one imagines Opalka must be: resolved, accepting, and making every moment count.

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