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ROMAN OPALKA: Standing before Time
By Bruno Corà
We may not objectively recall any analogies or comparisons -- although others have thought it possible to try -- as examples for the gesture made by Roman Opalka in 1965, when he started tracing the number 1 by applying white colour with a thin brush at the upper left corner of a black-coated canvas; he thus initiated the most radical and elementary visualization of the measuring of time to infinity ever produced until then. This is a well-informed statement, not oblivious to the fact that the existential relationship with the time dimension, inseparable from space, has been – in every age – at the heart of an immense amount of speculative activity of aesthetic, poetical, pictorial, literary, as well as scientific nature. Yet, in each of those endeavours, often requiring years of effort and intense elaboration - just limiting our gaze to the 20th century, we may think of Marcel Proust's “Recherche”, Martin Heidegger's “Being and Time”, Jorge Luìs Borges's “A History of Eternity” and “A New Refutation of Time”, or James Joyce's “Ulysses” and, finally, Paul Ricoeur's “Time and Narrative” - the identification of time was performed through a process of phenomenological synthesis; in each of these cases the essential individuation of time was attempted and defined through a formulation whose character was either metaphorical and poetical, or logical and philosophical, or finally scientific. But, as Opalka himself observed, "every thought is victim of its own formulation". Therefore, what came to be highlighted of the time - space dimension in these several experiences -- though indeed with extraordinary ability and perceptiveness -- was fundamentally an attribution of time based on parameters that mimic and evoke the human existence. In other terms, the time referenced in these experiences was in each case the time 'lost' or 're-gained' or 'lived'; or, in an Augustinian sense, the time 'of the soul', 'memorable', 'eternal', and ultimately 'divine'. Unlike all these extraordinary 'apertures', the one operated by Opalka has a temporally semiological value given by the total dissolving between the instantaneity and duration of life itself and by its objective measurement made by Opalka as he marks on the canvas, and through other means, the unfolding of time as this occurs.
The choice to measure temporality through a sequence of numerals coexisting with each other, while the voice pronounces them and a magnetophone records them, along with Opalka's photographic self-portraits at successive ages, offers an ideally ever-lasting image. The irreversible decision taken once and for all by the young Opalka to commit to a single criterion for measuring time through his entire life, thereby creating a conceptual relation with infinity, allows no alternatives or digressions, since such choice commands its author an inflexible tautological praxis. If Titian was able to evoke the stages of youth, virile maturity and old age in a single pictorial solution as in the oil painting “Allegory of Time governed by Prudence” (1565-1570 ca) where the temporal dilemma is resolved in a single image, for Opalka no allegory is any longer possible: every instant, beside being uttered by his recorded voice, is painted on canvas in the form of a sequence of numerals and also fixed as the effect of time on his own face photographed during each painting "session". The liturgy of measuring and recording the temporal instant as it passes alongside Opalka's own existence recalls nothing else but its own evidence: the artist and his age, the numbers of temporality uttered by him and traced with colour on canvas, the photograph of his face continuously changing.
The 'ecstasies' of temporality, the past, present, and future, occur simultaneously in Opalka's work. Each of Opalka's “Details” belongs to an indissoluble 'continuum'; but being part of an infinite ideal series, each “Detail” has the effect of immediately recalling the series' principle and essence. In Opalka's work, without eliminating the diversity that indeed exists between one piece and another, just like the phenomenal reality appears different in itself, the aspect that distinguishes one work from another is nonetheless almost imperceptible. Only at significant intervals, two canvases -- and so two photographic self-portraits -- present chromatic variations that can be easily appreciated, especially in the 'canvases’ background'; in the inexorable journey that accompanies the numbers toward their white on white destination. Much more radical and extreme than Andy Warhol's cinematic attempt to make the time in which events or actions occur coincide with the time of the movie's execution and fruition, Opalka's gesture does not measure the course of time only once; instead, he chants it obsessively throughout his entire life. Therefore he does not reproduce the world's events in real time, but time itself in its never-ending flowing. We cannot live of the past, nor of the future, nor of the present, but only of the 'passing' of temporal stages, since even those who claim to be living of the past, or future, or of the present, are never really in any of these conditions. If, then, in every present we experience a "passing" and if language implies a succession which may only be temporal, the real linguistic discovery in Opalka's art consists in having initiated, through the use of mathematical figures, the formalization in signs of the visualization of eternity. The numerical series and the consecutive self-portraits induce in the viewer a feeling of super-temporality, an emotional perception which rapidly ingenerates dismay and leads to the unconditional abandonment of any attempt to follow the figures of time, inviting individual reasoning to leave this sort of counting aside and ponder the eternal. According to Lucretius (“De rerum natura” I, 830), just like Anaxagoras believed gold to be made of gold particles and fire of sparks, so time could not but be made of consecutive elements of time. In light of such fundamental principles, Opalka has pushed language as far as to visualize time in relation to his own existence by individuating a form that offers an analytical image of time. He this way removes the possibility of symbolic and synthetic metaphors, while at the same time producing a measurement of real extent. Standing before the canvas just like the Auriga of Delphi stood before history and before the race of Time, as Opalka pronounces and paints the numbers while being portrayed by a lens, similar to an astronaut travelling through the cosmos toward another solar system, he is himself the image of man in the act of measuring his own existence within the space-time of eternity. The surface of a “Detail” by Opalka, with the different intensity in the numbers' colour, which allow to distinguish the beginning of the pictorial act of 'writing' through the exhaustion of colour itself, suggests the image of an instant made of small waves spuming on the oceanic expanse of time. Observing Opalka's work we are reminded of a verse from Leopardi's “The Infinite” in which he evokes the image of the mind shipwrecked in the sea. But far from being a 'sweet' shipwreck, the feeling arising here is dramatic and of vertiginous anxiety, because it originates questions about the sense of life and death to which there are no possible answers. Opalka's work, new sphinx of our era, poses the question of the time of life in the indifference of its naked textuality, from the distance of his conception of art and from its progressive incipient undecipherability. One has the impression that in those “Details” the very sense of art is being overcome and that, from this, a new cognitive 'aperture' might be springing.
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