Suppose the lotto ticket you bought today happens to have the winning number . . . of yesterday’s draw. Well, you still have a chance, though common sense would suggest otherwise. Marco Arce’s ticket to artistic success—his acute eye and precise hand—would have warranted a prize in yesterday’s art world, but the prevailing pattern calls for winners to be drawn from the disaffected rather than the virtuosi. While young Marco’s innate painterly abilities may seem to have become professional liabilities, he still has a chance and seems to want to stretch it far and wide.

In Arce’s recent