What, for a painter, surpasses the nobility of the human figure? Several human figures – or so we might gather. So many masterworks, from Leonardo’s “Last Supper” to “Night Watch” to “Guernica,” are heroic feats of composition. Trouble is, if you’re not Poussin, those half-dozen figures frolicking across a landscape are liable to look less like individuals with inner lives than marionettes being jerked on strings. Epic poetry can turn into traffic engineering with dismaying speed.

Graham Nickson rises to such challenges and prevails on his own terms, though with such bristling intensity that visitors to his ninth exhibition at Salander may feel they’re getting the same workout as his straining figures. The paintings – some the product of more than two decades of work – mostly depict a favorite theme, bathers at the shore. All display the familiar, formidable attack of strident colors and tightly knit dramas of pose and counterpose.

Although Mr. Nickson’s figures perform natural tasks in fairly ordinary settings, they gesture with the deliberateness of Neoclassical history paintings. Picture that magisterially raised arm in David’s “Death of Socrates.” Despite his turgid color, the artist’s drawing dominates in these paintings. Mr. Nickson, now in his late 50s, is dean of the New York Studio School and originator of its grueling Drawing Marathon.

In many areas, however, his hues vibrantly support the energy of his contours, lending a remarkable presence to gestures and light. In the lower left section of the immense “Edge Bathers” (1983-2005), a kneeling figure leans forward, placing her forearms on the towel spread before her. The artist energizes this inspired construction – taut angles of elbows springing from the great arc of a foreshortened back – with a few perfectly calibrated hues: a deep, dusky scarlet for the shadowed towel, rich purple on shaded flesh, vivid lights for their illuminated counterparts. Above, with a rare touch of mischief, the artist has placed a single lick of lightning against the implacable horizon.

In “Theoria” (1989-2005) contours and hues combine again to lend part of the image a wonderfully specific vitality. A standing woman stares upward at a clutch of balloons, her tipped head held at our eye level. Her vertical form stretches below with monumental sureness, its length measured out by opposing notations of bathing suit, ribs, and knees. The sand at her feet seems far from the head, in part because of subtle pressures of color: Though both are varieties of orange, the sand throbs as if absorbing sunlight, while the skintones radiate it. It’s a marvel how this subtle difference urges the figure’s vertical rise out of flatness.

One side effect of the highly deliberated drawing in Mr. Nickson’s figure paintings is that the hues, while occupying aggressive points on a color wheel, are often surprisingly passive in establishing the overall composition. Intensity of color and pictorial presence are not necessarily the same thing. In “Reflection” (1989-2005) light pours through a window into a darkened interior, casting a sequence of beams on a woman’s hair and the wall behind. These patches, though varying in hue, have exactly the same pictorial weight; the hair has just as much of a rapport with the wall as the rest of the figure.

A true colorist like Matisse or Veronese hierarchizes his color, particularizing each step of movement with weights of hue. Since Mr. Nickson’s potent drawing tends to be the sole determinant of scale and focus in his works, certain passages of color are left in a kind of compositional purgatory. To the left of that powerful vertical figure in “Theoria” is another individual, clutching an inflatable whale. Here the same electric pinks and stolid purples describe elements of both man and whale, flattening and completely deflating their presence in the surrounding color sequences.

The result is so complete as to seem deliberate. The artist’s intentions for drawing are evident in every square inch of his canvases, but his color – in-your-face, but elusive; vital here, disconnected there – is an enigma. Perhaps that’s why these uningratiating, forceful paintings remain so intriguing.

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In the first-floor gallery at Salander, the paintings of Giorgio Cavallon (1904-89) are considerably lower-keyed. More joyful in execution and milder in ambition, these painterly abstractions have an immediate, comparatively innocent appeal. The artist used a lively color range to animate compositions of slightly rough rectangles with occasionally rounded forms. His technique is unaffected, as if businesslike brushstrokes were simply what the artist found adequate for his purposes. His goal seems to have been consistent: the uncovering of innate qualities of color and form and the movements between them.

There’s no doubt about the artist’s influences. A native of Italy, he emigrated to the United States in 1920 and shortly began studying under Charles Hawthorne. But the influence of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied for almost a decade in the 1930s and 1940s, rings through every painting here. Countless artists may have passed through Hofmann’s schools, but Cavallon’s paintings, with their uneven blocks of color, are especially close to his teacher’s. Mr. Cavallon has a gentler touch and seems more inclined to layer colors in subtle veils, but his works have the same sense of exploration, of proceeding from hunches and seeing where they lead.

The 11 paintings here amount to a survey of four decades of work, and his steady development can be seen within the lyrical confines he set for himself. A work from 1948 (untitled, like almost every painting in the exhibition) neatly shows off the pulsating energy of the gridded patterns he favored in the 1940s. There may well be 100 different colors in this painting, each confined to its own cell but reacting in a distinct way to its neighbors: eclipsing them, shouldering against them, or wedging or slipping behind.

Several canvases from the 1950s show how the artist began placing his colored forms against white fields. The pale backgrounds, quietly throbbing from many underlying tints, lend a slightly otherworldly aspect. Looser and broader shapes appear in later decades. A large painting from 1988, the year before his death, shows him still composing at full speed. Cavallon exhibited extensively during his lifetime and his work is in several major museum collections, but he didn’t enjoy the level of fame of some of his colleagues. Judging from these plainspoken but articulate paintings, he deserves better.

Until April 30 (Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 20 E. 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-879-6606). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.