Arnold Mesches recent paintings are painted on top of some of the most familiar images in Western art—among them Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, and Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Or, rather, they are painted over copies after photographs, as a detail—a mechanically cropped and reproduced image—from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment points out. Mesches’ grounds are aged as well as historical; his repaintings are sanded down and varnished over. Buried under a dark glaze, they are meant to be more than images from the past. They are images of their own pastness: witnesses,