Opalka – One Life, One Oeuvre

From 1965 until his death in 2011, a few months after shooting for this film wrapped, conceptual artist Roman Opalka painted white numeric progressions on black canvases, all the same size as the door of his Warsaw studio. Rendering their backgrounds ever more evanescent with a gradual increase in the percentage of white he used, in his last years he arrived at a white-on-white mode of painting. Narrated by the artist in the first person, the documentary re-traces his life and work in an extremely direct manner, following the red thread of his work, “Détails”: moments of a single radical project entirely dedicated to the pictorial recording of the passage of time “from one to infinity”. Starting in the 70s, he began using photography and sound recordings as well. Against a musical background by Mateusz Zaluski, Opalka recites his numbers in Polish while painting them; his voice accompanies us throughout the film, which won the Grand Prix at the most recent Festival de Montreal, in 2012.