On the pristine white background, the same colours become pulp.
The shopping bag under the house is pulp. The skirt gathered between her legs and the badly bandaged wound are pulp. Even the sandwich complete with its feasting fly is pulp, although the reference to the anecdote nvolving Giotto and Cimabue does lighten the tone, mixing it with that of story and legend. Everything in the scene is pulp, everything, that is, except the book by St. Augustine. At the moment when the eye finally comes to rest – with extreme mastery – on the book and its title, the entire composition changes meaning. From that point on, the shopping bag becomes exclusively a question of survival, the skirt and the wound become distraction and neglect, the fly transforms nto a simple disturbing element that can no longer tear attention away from the beloved page that is so totally absorbing the subject, and with it, her awareness. The viewer spies on her during this intimate act of reading; unaware and lost in reading, she ignores being observed.