Just past the entrance to “Nachbild” (After Image), the first solo show in a German institution by Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam, one saw a grotto. Photographed in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, it reached to the ceiling: a slide projection on an almost entirely freestanding painted wooden board. At the center of the grotto, as part of the photographic mise-en-scène, stands an easel with a painting that in turn displays a landscape, Leiderstam’s own copy of Nicolas Poussin’s Spring or the Earthly Paradise, painted in Rome in the seventeenth century.

At first we seemed to be viewing a sort of