From 1965 up until now: telling Opalka’s time in painting and in photography

Abstract

We pursued the project of artist Roman Opalka through evidences of his creative process which is accomplished on numerically tagged paintings and daily photographs of his own face. This article focuses Opalka’s (1965/1-”) canvases and pictures as an expression of time as a procedural, flowing and irreversible element, by differentiating it of the cross time (mémoire invonlontaire) as suggested in Marcel Proust. Each painting or photograph in his artwork correspond to a chronologically counted time, repeated, persistent, and not open to occasional stops.