Elizabeth Dee presents Pour Tout Diviser, an exhibition of work by Swiss artist Philippe Decrauzat, as “a two-sided exhibition in three acts.” The first and second apparently occurred in Madrid and Paris, so New Yorkers experience the show’s conclusion. (There is no indication at the Chelsea gallery of what the European displays were like.) Without speculating as to what exactly makes the exhibition “two-sided,” the notion of a spatio-temporally divided exhibition itself puts a critic in an awkward position. One hesitates to pass judgment on a fragment; at the same time, one cannot but wonder if the exhibition is being presented as such for this very reason: to evade rigorous criticism. The approach here will be to give Decrauzat the benefit of the doubt on this point and progress through Act Three with a nonetheless critical eye.

Philippe Decrauzat. Pour Tout Diviser; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York. Photograph by Etienne Frossard.

The exhibition consists of fourteen paintings of various widths, featuring vibrating moiré patterns in magenta and cyan. They are mounted on seven freshly erected, freestanding walls—one canvas per side—that exactly match the widths of the paintings they support. These horizontal dimensions, it turns out, derive from the fenestration pattern of the gallery’s façade, which alternates between brick and glass in seven corresponding sections. The optically entrancing rhythm of overlapping lines on Decrauzat’s canvases mirrors both the distribution of new walls in the gallery’s interior and the artist’s sensitivity to the sequence of verticals fronting the gallery’s existing architectural space. Meanwhile, in an adjacent gallery, a silent 16mm film further inflects this mode of perceptual engagement. In it, double-exposed footage of a spinning object (described only as “a scientific object of light wave research”) yields an abstract and hypnotic interplay of light and shadow.

Philippe Decrauszat. On Cover, 2014; acrylic on canvas; 74 3/4 x 31 1/2 in.

These various components indicate a method of looking that seeks to exceed the boundaries of, say, the 1960s Op Art that the paintings alone would inevitably bring to mind (as much of the artist’s past work does). But ultimately the work remains within a distinctly 20th-century gambit: The film has a surrealist patina, and the strategy of drawing awareness to the gallery as a specific architectural space was a maneuver well-plumbed in the 1960s and ’70s. The recombinatory value here is unfortunately slim. In view of this, the exhibition’s presentation as a multipart, bi-continental epic reads as distastefully compensatory—as though the only way to endow the work with contemporaneity were to formulate a globetrotting group as its ideal audience. In this regard, the show is certainly not beyond criticism.

Philippe Decrauzat: Pour Tout Diviser is on view at Elizabeth Dee through October 29, 2014.