Is it the back of a woman's dress? I wonder, standing before a cherry-red painting by Domenico Gnoli at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

It's not until I step several feet away from the canvas, an over-five-foot square, that I realize the work depicts a tie knot, ultra-cropped and punched in until it's almost abstracted. Up close, I'm captivated by the rhythmic, perfectly rendered lines of the ribbed fabric. Under the late Italian artist's hand, this mundane object evokes a sculpture, akin to paintings by Park Seo-Bo, in which repeated pencil lines are carved into a still-wet surface, producing three-dimensional texture.

That meticulous trompe-l'oeil effect is just one of countless tricks that Gnoli had up his sleeve, as evidenced in the survey at Lévy Gorvy Dayan—the largest American exhibition of Gno