This large abstract painting presents the surrounding council estate as a single, looming presence. It is painted over a panel that Dudek began working on in 2016, inspired by Roman Opalka’s use of counting as a strategy for thinking through time, scale, and infinity. Dudek set out to apply one million individual cuts of medical tape to the surface, each one carefully counted, testing whether the panel could physically contain such an accumulation. The original vision did not reach its numerical conclusion: the work holds 270,000 cuts, all meticulously recorded, with notes preserved on the back of the panel. Rather than a failure, this threshold marked a turning point.
The buried labor of this earlier attempt remains embedded in the surface, its subtle relief now animating the painting. The cuts pulse like resilient bodies in motion, evoking density, repetition, and collective life. Over this field, Dudek layers a veil of white paint that recalls the cold grey concrete of social housing blocks he photographs wherever he travels. For some, this whitening softens and warms the image; for others, it reads as ice so frozen it appears on the verge of melting. The surface is ultimately heated from within, through burning, cutting, and abrasion, transforming restraint into pressure and stasis into movement.

While rooted in Dudek’s own upbringing on a council estate, the work reflects a broader investigation into similar social structures encountered in Molenbeek, Paris, and Manchester. What emerges is not a specific place, but a shared architectural and social condition; monumental, fragile, and persistently alive.