Matthieu Ronse riffs on and reworks the history and legacy of oil painting, skillfully adopting the styles of old masters such as Rembrandt and Velazquez. Ambivalent toward these predecessors, he often subverts his final image by tearing or burning the canvas or allowing paint to drip and smudge. Ronse’s sculptures and mixed-media pieces frequently rearrange art historical fragments in self-referential or ironic ways. His “Cheap Imitations” series presents pastiches of religious paintings whose satire is expressed in titles such as Saint Hilarious. Anti-perfectionist, Ronse adopts tongue-in-cheek humor as he questions what it means to be a painter in the 21st century.