Brain Food #397
Measuring a life
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Roman Opalka was a Polish conceptual artist who attempted to paint infinity. The largest part of his work consisted of a long series of consecutive numbers, painted on multiple canvases. Beginning in 1965, he started by painting a ‘1’ in the top left corner. Following that moment, every day he would paint 400 consecutive numbers. When the canvas space ran out, he would continue on a fresh one.
As he continued to paint the numbers, he also switched to a progressively whiter paint colour, eventually painting white on white.
Describing his work, he said, “All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life […] The problem is that we are, and are about not to be.”
Perhaps his act was not to portray infinity, but to show the difficulty and futility of measuring a life, something highly relevant in today’s need to quantify everything.
The sum? 5,607,249.
“Time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance. We are at the same time alive and in the face of death — that is the mystery of all living beings”
— Roman Opalka
Opalka 1965/1 – ∞, Detail 993460–1017875
Opalka 1965/1 -∞, Détail 4988006 -5006015