«Glitch in the matrix (2)»

In late 18th-century Germany, critics worried about a new illness they called Lesesucht, reading addiction. Much of the worry was about young women and novels: too much time alone with a book, too much imagination, too little supervision. A woman reading was something to watch. Today she barely registers, at least online, and that silence is where this glitch art painting starts.

Same woman, same pose, same broken face as in the first Glitch in the matrix. She stands with her back to us, braids pinned up, her profile split into strips that don't line up. This time she is dressed, in a loose knitted sweater, and she is reading a picture book with a beanstalk climbing up the page. The red notification bubble above her head shows zero likes and zero comments.

On the canvas, the sweater gets more attention than anything else. Every rib of the knit and every dark speckle is put down by hand, and the fabric has a weight the glitching face can't match. The same pixel blocks of cyan, red, pink and blue hang to the left, and the black background has raised shapes that show when light crosses it.

Painters loved women reading long before any feed existed. Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Fragonard's Young Girl Reading both treat a woman with a book as a private moment worth looking at. Contemporary pop art lets me turn that around. Here, private means invisible: naked, she gets 13K comments; clothed and reading, she gets nothing. The algorithm doesn't punish her. It just doesn't see her.

This is the original pop art painting, 120 x 90 cm, one canvas. It's a quieter piece of glitch art, and good statement wall art for a reading corner or a living room. The image also exists as a hand-finished lithograph. Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email.