Roman Opałka was a French-born Polish painter who painted numbers. In 1965 he began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. Starting in the top left-hand corner of the canvas and finishing in the bottom right-hand corner, the tiny numbers were painted in horizontal rows. Each new canvas, which the artist called a ‘detail’, took up counting where the last left off. As of July 2004, he had reached 5.5 million. All details have the same title, “1965 / 1 – ∞”; the project had no definable end, and the artist pledged his life to its ongoing execution: ‘All my work is a single thing, the description from number one to infinity. A single thing, a single life’, ‘the problem is that we are, and are about not to be’.
(Source: bbbbird, via typographie)