In September 1973 Opalka completed a Detail in which he ‘crossed the million’ – as he phrased it in a telegram to a collector. It had taken him eight years, and he was now 42 years old.
In 1972, the year before, he decided to modify his commitment to retaining an absolute consistency in his canvases in one important way.
He planned to alter the dark grey background on which he had been painting his numbers, ‘to make each subsequent painting about 1% lighter than the one before it’. It is also apparent that with the passing years the portrait photographs he takes of himself are becoming increasingly lighter.
Opalka envisages the day when, in his Details, figure and ground will merge completely, and he will be applying white on white, so that the numbers become entirely invisible. At that moment, the only lasting documentation of the artist’s activity would be the audio recording of him counting out the digits as he proceeds up the number continuum.
It is clear that the whitening of the canvases is intended as a visual correlative to numerical progression. If a range of his Details were arranged sequentially, a viewer would perceive at a distance a gradual, controlled bleaching of the paintings – only accentuating the continuity of the project from decade to decade.
Opalka explained that he came to this decision to modify the colour of his backgrounds after having reflecting on how many Details he would be able to produce over the course of his life: he calculated this, apparently, based on the life expectancy of an average European. We can surmise then that he estimated he would be approaching white on white at a stage extremely late in his life.
In a similar way as Achilles will never get ahead of the tortoise in Zeno’s famous paradox, it is physically impossible for Opalka ever to attain a pure background by adding a little more lighter paint to his grey mix. In perceptual terms, however, he is now noticeably near to painting on a white background.
Opalka will be eighty this year, and it is hard not to analogize the paleness of his canvases to the whiteness of the hair in the accompanying photographs, which are now very light and over-exposed. Yet the whitening might also be perceived as symbolic of a gradual reaching towards infinity in an absolute sense.
Opalka’s art seems to constantly invoke the ideal of infinity as completion, enlightenment, wholeness – as something superior than what Hegel would call a ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ infinity (just one thing after another, going on for ever). The prospect of attaining this state is the constant underlying drama underscoring Opalka’s relentless progression.