** condition: M/NM ** Limited edition of 400. Gatefold sleeve. In 1965, while sitting at the Café Bristol in Warsaw waiting for his wife to arrive, French-born Polish painter Roman Opałka conceived an idea that would consume the rest of his life: to paint numbers sequentially from one to infinity, a project that would become one of the most profound meditations on time, existence, and mortality in contemporary art. Upon arriving at his studio the following day, Opałka began painting small numbers in white pigment using a number "0" brush, creating rhythmical horizontal striations against a black background. Each canvas, or Detail, would begin in the upper left corner and gradually move to the lower right. The dimensions—196 x 135 cm—corresponded to his physical height and the width of his Warsaw studio door. Every canvas took up where the previous one left off, all bearing the same title: OPALKA 1965/1-∞.

In 1968, Opałka began speaking each number into a tape recorder before he painted it and photographing himself in front of the canvas after a day of work. He would count aloud each numeral while coordinating the tiny movements of his brush. This aural dimension—Opałka's voice intoning numbers in his native Polish—became as integral to the work as the paintings themselves, capturing not just the passage of time but the artist's presence within it. In 1972, he decided that he would gradually lighten the grey background by adding 1% more white to the ground with each passing detail, expecting to be painting virtually in white on white by the time he reached 7,777,777. He called this "blanc merité" (well-deserved white), the ultimate horizon where numbers would dissolve into invisibility. As Opałka himself stated: "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." His project was never about reaching infinity—an impossible goal—but about the act of moving toward it, making visible the inexorable flow of time and our mortality within it.

Over four decades, his 1965/1-∞ project grew to comprise 233 paintings known as Details; the final number was 5,607,249. Opałka died at age 79 on August 6, 2011, after falling ill while on holiday in Italy. His death marked the logical completion of his work—the finite defined by the infinite. This vinyl release presents the extraordinary sonic component of Opałka's life work: his voice, methodically counting numbers as he painted them, a meditation transformed into sound. It is a document of rare philosophical and artistic importance, capturing an artist's breath, rhythm, and presence across decades. The voice ages, shifts, deepens—a sonic self-portrait as powerful as his photographic ones. This recording is not merely documentation—it is the work itself, in its purest temporal form. Opałka understood that "time as we live it and as we create it embodies our progressive disappearance. We are at the same time alive and in the face of death—that is the mystery of all living beings."

An essential document for anyone interested in conceptual art, time-based practice, or the intersection of sound and visual art. Absolutely essential.