For more than 40 years, Julian Stanczak has been making perceptual abstract paintings with a reduced grammar of line and color that addresses the visual activity of color and shape. With more than a dozen works dating from 1966 to today, this eye-catching survey at Danese gallery features a selection of works by a key figure in the art and design movement that became an international phenomenon in the early 1960s.

Popularized by the term “Op Art” when it was introduced to a wider public in the groundbreaking show “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, the movement underscored a viewer-centered experience and the individual psychological response. Mr. Stanczak, who was included in that show, lives in Cleveland and taught for 31 years at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

This show comes at a time when there seems to be a soft revival of that idiom, and Mr. Stanczak, along with Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz, can thus be seen as paving the way for younger generations of artists working today, such as Terry Haggerty, Lori Ellison, and Henry Brown. The foundations of the Perceptual Art, or Optical Art, movement go back to the Dutch group De Stijl, Suprematism in Russia, and to Weimar Germany. There, in 1919, Walter Gropius formed the Bauhaus School for fine and applied art in order to bring together artists with diverse philosophical interests in search of a pure, elemental language of line, color, and geometry. The faculty who had been infused with the progressive design program dispersed across Europe and America when the Nazis officially closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Gropius moved to Boston to join the Harvard School of Design, László Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago, where he founded the Institute of Design, and a young Josef Albers joined Philip Johnson at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later went on to Yale in 1950 to teach his rigorous color theories to younger generations of artists, including Mr. Stanczak.

A large 50-panel piece, “Parade of Reds” (2006–08), is installed as a grid in a long rectangle. The 16-by-16-inch panels share color families, and each has a slightly different arrangement of geometric forms and tones causing them to appear to sit at different depths, either closer to or deeper from the wall plane. Some of the images are repeated in different color combinations and rotated, inviting the viewer to search for a pattern or system in the arrangement. On close view, this playful piece, as does all of Mr. Stanczak’s work, shows the matter-of-fact way it was made. Lines determined by tape and colored paint, all parts traceable on the surface, and no tricks or gimmicks, just the interplay of color and light. These works, whose powerful retinal effects can feel hallucinatory in their visual movement, are refreshing to see in their all-at-once quality, where nothing is hidden and no wall text is needed.

Another piece, “Lumina, Offering Orange” (1991), is a large square made of smaller gridded squares whose radiant center appears to pulse with a slow beat tempered by an atmospheric quality. It hangs in contrast to a neighboring piece of near-identical formal organization whose sharp central light seems more electrified, as if informed by popular culture and advertising.

The magic of this work resides in the range of experience and in the variety of types Mr. Stanczak has achieved by steadily, ingeniously mining this short list of elements.

Until April 22 (535 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-223-2227).