Émile Bernard once recounted to the ailing Cézanne the fate of Frenhofer, the tragic hero of Balzac’s novella “The Unknown Masterpiece.” After a decade spent reworking the same female nude, the fictional 17th-century painter exhausts his creative genius and captures transcendent beauty itself. But when he shows this masterpiece to his historical counterparts, a tyro Poussin and the court painter Franz Pourbus, both see only a canvas daubed with a mess of color and a mass of incomprehensible lines. Where the visionary artist sees a woman lying on a bed, everyone else sees the work of a raving lunatic.

“Cézanne got up from the table,” Bernard later recalled, “and striking his chest with his index finger designated himself — without a word — as the very person in the story.”

Italian artist Giulio Paolini, best known as a member of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s, takes the same story as the source for his own Balzacian endeavor: four exhibitions, each consisting of four new works, held in the four separate locations of Marian Goodman and Yvon Lambert galleries in Paris and New York.

As a halting example of gnomic conceptualism, it all seems to have missed the irony of Balzac’s romanticized depiction of the artist’s condition.

An allegory of artistic transgression and the vicissitudes of creativity, the novella is one of the defining fables of modernism. Those who have identified with Frenhofer are legion, from Cézanne to Henry James and Karl Marx. Picasso not only made a set of etchings based on the story, but made as his studio the house in Paris where it takes place; he painted “Guernica” there in 1937.

“The Unknown Artist,” as Mr. Paolini’s exhibitions are collectively titled, is a sprawling series of austere, cryptic, and largely indeterminate gestures, some as slight as half-squares drawn directly on the wall, others as fatuous as a ball of crumbled paper on a Plexiglas plinth.

The prevailing theme throughout is the artist’s studio as a place of suspended finality, where ideas and images come in and out of focus in varying degrees of crystallization. Mr. Paolini takes this principle through abstracted iterations, placing us in his studio in the cadenced, geometric photographs of “Synopsis,” at Marian Goodman in Paris, or at his “work table” in “Album,” through an elliptical rendering of his process as geometric sketches and modular sculptural units — frames, Plexiglas cases, drawn squares — at Yvon Lambert in New York.

Dry-as-dust in description, these variations on square proportions and perceptive illusion are just as hard to grasp in person. This perhaps isn’t surprising for an artist who has claimed: “A work of art has nothing to say, no message to convey.” Is it puerile to accord meaning where it’s been forsaken?

The convergence of basic forms and elements are as obvious as they are impossible to decrypt. Only purely formal correspondences — say, between a line drawing in one space and its sculptural reprise in another — along with Mr. Paolini’s play with the limits of representation, give any hint of meaning. If the term “analytical” ever applied appositely, it’s in this insipid formalism, which traces out the idea of ideal beauty without ever limning its affective result.

Mr. Paolini’s strength lies in what he can craft from a paucity of materials, in the typically Arte Povera concern with open-ended experimentation and trying to transcend the very elements of art making with no formal or conceptual limitation. But the viewer was always at the center of that experience, and ultimately, of any meaning. This is lost in the almost mystical economy — all those fours — and the seemingly “inner arcane” that governs the new work. In this, artists such as Matthew Barney and Matt Mullican, whose language is as evocative as it is personal, outpace him.

It’s surprising for an artist whose remarkable body of work once made him a poet who declaimed in the vulgate of classicism. Mr. Paolini’s best work is defined precisely by a dogged sense of the art of the past and of the intimate link between art, life, and memory.

Balzac’s fantasy of creation broken free of time threatens to get lost in the chasm between the indecipherable and the prophetic. Early in the story, the older Frenhofer criticizes Poussin’s painting of the Virgin Mary for lacking life. But perhaps fully understanding the irony of his gambit, and either in the fever of madness or divine inspiration, he says of his own masterpiece: “Where’s the art? Gone, vanished!”