“It was in 2014, in Lodz, that I saw Detail 1 from Opalka for the first time. I gazed at it for some hours, as the days went by, so that it could become rooted deep within myself. And then, overcome with fear of not being able to see it forever, I took some pictures of details. Details from Detail, if I may say so. Protected by a plate glass, the canvas invited me in the picture. So that I was back from Poland with a self-portrait against my will. Maybe it is a happy coincidence, I thought. In the way Opalka paints this infinite series of figures all over his life, there is something like a Sisyphus way, it is an obvious fact. And this is not that much about a Sisyphus in torture, but more about Albert Camus’ Sisyphus: “the struggle itself toward the top is enough to fill up a man’s heart. We have to imagine Sisyphus happy.” In front of my self-portrait, questioning the happiness, but also the pain, as such as the solitude, I have written the telling about what I see. Making a score from a stare on oneself, climbing the endless mountain which seems sometimes to turn to be the life, and which so often brings us back to the feeling of needing to do it again, to react, to set off again, to return to the 1.” (Colin Roche)