“When we look at a painting,” says Thomas Huber, “we’re faced with an enigma. It becomes apparent in the distance that we perceive there, the strange illusion of depth of the pictorial space. Looking at the painting, we feel as if we were entering it, but in fact we stay just where we began, on the surface. . . . The viewer is caught between these two poles—the depth perspective of the painting and the fact that it has been painted.” This passage, from Huber’s text Das Hochzeitsfest (The wedding feast)—a text that he wrote to accompany his series of paintings of the same name—refers to a property