“But the oddest thing was the oval shape of the saint’s golden halo: it was like a hole into which he was disappearing head first. All the rest of the image was flat and depthless and without background, kind of blandly omnipresent - but then suddenly you got this other dimension entirely: an absence, a slipping away. When I asked Mavsek about it he told me that the visual motif was called ellipsus, but added that this motif didn’t properly belong to this type of image. For some reason, he was copying the painting twice, so there were three saints, three mountains, three oceans, goodness knows how many ships, being formed in front of me while I sat drinking coffee after coffee.”