Josef Zekoff himself describes not a niche, but a portal that opens out into the space of the city and the outdoors, revealing light and a garden. The picture remains a picture, but it has a subject. It is not the picture as an object, but its subject that takes precedence over everything else. Anyone who brings painting and drawing, the original and the reproduction, and art history into the discussion has overlooked painting itself. All that remains is the distance from which the visible appears, if at all, to be difficult to discipline or ungovernable. But is the outdoors merely alien, light merely illumination, and the garden merely overgrowth? Precisely when this seems to be the case, the appearance becomes the object and the distance becomes the point of reference. In a book on Kant, Karl Jaspers speaks of the phenomenal nature of the world and of our existence. ‘Outside, Light and Garden’ points to an approach of general significance. Just as the battlefield once was, in the Age of Enlightenment painting is the field on which everything is decided.