Ena Swansea treads ground between artifice and reality. Her figuration eschews academic formulas, and her show is thus at once engaging and uneven: Some canvases are belabored by nerdishly rendered inanimate objects – an automobile or an air conditioner – that upset the delicate ratio between transparency and opaqueness. Other images, equally strange in their drawing, are actually animated by that awkwardness.

Despite a couple of turkeys, the best paintings make this exhibition one of singular power and importance. Ms. Swansea achieved a slick, contained, fully resolved still-life style before succumbing to the temptation of human subjects. Ambiguous shadows cast by flora and vegetation produced images of compelling beauty. And her turn to figuration seems less a style gambit than an expressive necessity.

Her shadow play led to experimentation with elaborate setups, in her case utilizing the camera obscura. The new imagery extends the photographic metaphor. One image, of a child’s head, is entitled “color negative” (2004): Like all the works in the show, it is painted on a ground of graphite, a material of sinister ethereality, at once leaden and other-worldly.

Ms. Swansea can paint with exhilarating facility: “devil on the road” (2004), an ambiguously poised, goggled, and spandex-clad red demon casting his shadow on shimmering, near-molten asphalt is a suitably devilish display of painterly sleights of hand, convincing, beguiling, and deft.

The real showstopper, though, is a 15-foot-long dinner party scene that recalls a Tintoretto last supper in its compressions and foreshortenings. This image, at once timeless and a painting of modern life, offers an appropriately inebriated perspective: The distorted still-life arrangements and stilted figure poses have the eye lurching between ease and alienation, speed and arrest. In its fusion of fluency and awkwardness, this rich, complex work recalls Manet at his weirdest.

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Will Cotton’s latest paintings give new meaning to the term “eye candy.” His four canvas show at Mary Boone continues his photorealist preoccupation with the motif for which he is best known, confectionery. But this time he forcibly fuses it with what had been a second subject in his work, the erotic female nude.

Mr. Cotton’s candyscapes collide the genres of landscape and still life, constructing spatially ambiguous vistas out of perceptual and digestive excess. Usually there is a gaudy overload of sweet things, whether ice creams, chocolates, familiar mass-produced goodies like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, or toffees and caramels, in a molten state, rendered in suitably sickly, saccharine hues. His modus operandi is to photograph complex constructions of such stuff and render the painted image in deadpan academic hand.

In a sign of twisted restraint, “Cotton Candy Cloud” (2004) confines itself to a single treat, cotton candy – unless, that is, we semantically join his sexist orgy and classify the voluptuous reclining redhead as a sweet thing, too. The puffing pinkness cannot but be read as an eponymous stand-in for the artist himself: Its folds almost read like musculature.

Art-historically, the image overtly references Cabanel and Bougereau, the 19th-century “pompier” classicists. This recalls Mr. Cotton’s education at the New York Academy, which promotes “technique” in the beauxarts sense of the word. But Mr. Cotton’s nudes, more Vargas than Velazquez, lag behind his confectionery in sexiness.

The problem with them is that they come with baggage: The more he tries to make them voluptuous, the more they recall a grand tradition in which, by painting with giant quotation marks around his own expressivity and curiosity, he can but be a testy footnote. They aren’t at all convincingly drawn from life, but neither is there any sense that they derive from a specific kind of artifice – in the way, for instance, Cecily Brown uses hardcore pornography. This deprives them of the warped frisson of vitality enjoyed by his cookies and chocolates, ambiguously poised as they are between reality and artifice.

On their own, the still-life motifs were intriguing, if not enticing, readymade puns on the idea of the synthetic. With the addition of this lethargic classicism, however, his ice-cream melts away into silliness on a par with Lisa Yuskavage.

His delivery contrasts with the great modern master of the cream cake and spandex nude, Wayne Thiebaud. Mr. Cotton’s images have some initial energy thanks to their kitsch overload of slick rendering, but that turns out to be the pictorial equivalent of a sugar boost. A Thiebaud is good enough to eat, but a Cotton gives you little, aesthetically, to get your teeth into.

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The compact display of tiny oil sketches by Lois Dodd at Alexandre – the septuagenarian’s third show at that gallery in two years – deserves critical and appreciative attention: The 50 works, propped on ledges and dating as far back as 1990, are exquisite fun.

These plein-air paintings are done on roofer’s flashings – thin, aluminum panels of 5-by-7 inches. As such, they are like postcards from the front line of observational painting. The medium, eccentric yet practical and effective, is true to this artist’s character: Ms. Dodd is one of the true mavericks of American painting, a quietly audacious realist whose quirky, enigmatic, and heartfelt observations of the rural scene make her the supreme “artist’s artist” of the New York school.

These lyrical, hardnosed sketches capture, in completely unaffected simplicity, such phenomena as floral color dissonances, subtle nocturnal lighting effects, movements of water, a shimmering breeze. At this size and speed, the artist’s affinities with her better-known contemporary, Alex Katz, and their mutual mentor, Milton Avery, are clear. But so too is her utter individuality.

In scale, slickness, and “attitude” Ms. Dodd could not be further removed from either Mr. Cotton or Ms. Swansea, and yet she does share with these younger artists an intuitive sense that oddity and credibility can make happy bedfellows.