The Pendulum Swings

ART DIES A BEAUTIFUL DEATH

STORMY WEATHER PIERCED BY SUNSHINE

(Pia Fries at Christopher Grimes Gallery)

The Polish-born artist, Roman Opalka, who now lives in France, started his masterpiece almost forty years ago and he has not finished it yet. In 1965, while still in Poland, he painted a canvas in solid black, and, using it as a blackboard, he painted in white the number one, then number two and number three and so on and so forth. The counting began at the top left corner of the first canvas and formed horizontal lines from top to bottom, producing a melancholic spidery lace of flickering white numbers. The counting on each new painting continued where the previous one left off. Now, two hundred canvases later, the counting has exceeded six million. In each new piece, one percent of white has been added to the initially black background. As a result, the background of his most recent canvases has become pearly gray, and if God grants the 72 year-old artist another decade, Roman Opalka will end up painting white numbers on a white background. His own death will bring the whole project to an inevitable, logical end.

You may look at this lifetime project as the artistic ego dissolving into a white void. Or you may see it as obsessive-compulsive behavior on a par with that of a medieval monk chained to his duty of copying religious texts. Each painting of Roman Opalka comes with an audio tape of the artist slowly pronouncing the numbers as he paints them. He also documents his own aging in a series of black and white photographs of his face on a white background, his once dark hair slowly turning white, the process paralleling that of his painting. Upon entering the elegantly minimalistic white cube of the Grant Selwyn Gallery, which hosts the Roman Opalka show until January 4th, be prepared to confront your own sense of mortality. The artworks are difficult, sad, and ultimately beautiful.