Paintings are sometimes like femmes fatales. You know they are trouble but you fall for them anyway. John Lees might well approve of this analogy, as he is a devotee of film noir. The one drawing in his first New York solo exhibition in nine years is the 9-foot-wide “Scroll Noir for Ann Savage, ‘Vera'” (2002–05), in watercolor, ink, gouache, pencil, Conté crayon, and silver point. This is an assemblage of adjoining pieces of paper, listing dozens of classic and obscure movie titles in a chronologically tabulated arrangement, with a fey but alluring pencil portrait of the starlet at its center.

What is primarily to love and at the same time distrust about Mr. Lees is his self-professed obsessiveness. This takes the form, in the mottled surfaces of his slowly worked landscapes, figure studies, and still life paintings, of accretion, stress, and mutedness. Mr. Lees is addicted to all the tropes of effort. He wears his art-historical allegiances on his sleeve: Georges Rouault, Alberto Giacometti, and School of London painters.

The weirdly worked, at once alienating and alluring surfaces of Mr. Lees’s paintings trigger a memory — apropos British realists — of a 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition titled “The Hard-Won Image,” which sported a photograph of Frank Auerbach’s heroically messy studio, in which everything was coated in paint scraped from unsuccessful sessions at the easel. Hard-wonness is a worthy, somewhat puritanical sentiment that tugs on the conscience of viewers to give extra credit to pictures that are slowly, obsessively worked — a salient feature of Mr. Lees’s enterprise.

Mr. Lees belongs to an American strain of hard winners such as the neo-Romantic Jake Berthot, his stablemate at Betty Cuningham Gallery, and the expressive realist Stanley Lewis, who recently staged an impressive exhibition of Rust Belt urban landscapes at the Bowery Gallery, just over the road. At the same time, other Americans who share his sensibility, including Nicolas Carone, Eric Holzman, and Joseph Santore, add to this same ethos a contrastive characteristic of Mediterranean effulgence. Mr. Lees’s show offers an intriguing mix of angst and epicureanism, triggering Thomas Mannian associations, respectively, of northern and southernness. There are Italian subjects like “Fields in Umbria” (2000–07), with burnt umber ground and hedonistic globs of paint that register as congealed sunshine. But there is also a brooding dark romanticism of heavy greens and golds, as in “Bronxville Bump” (2002–07) with its mysterious, serpentine form and barely legible, Pinkham Ryder-like murk.

Mr. Lees’s surfaces are deliciously distressed. His pictures have the battered, timeworn quality of a masterpiece discovered in a thrift store. His portraits — whether of his wife, “Ruth (Face)” (1979–2005); a familiar cartoon pig in “Pompeiian Porky” (2003–07), or the jazzman Bix Beiderbecke, in “Rhythm King” (1984–2008) — have a Trecento primitivism about them. “Bathtub” (1973–2007), with its abraded impasto, its at-once precious and crude simplicity, has a tragicomic air that brings to mind the early 20th-century revival of Italian primitivism of the metaphysical painter Carlo Carrà.

And then we learn from poet William Corbett’s catalog essay that the artist “often paints on small rectangular panels that he first used as palettes” to get a head start on the hard-won look. Drawing papers “a little too light-toned for his tastes” are put to work as matting on his studio floor. The emotionally wrought sense of labor-intensity and devotion, in other words, is partially achieved rather in the way a framer or cabinetmaker distresses wood to get an antique look. What, alas, also gets distressed in the process, in Mr. Lees’s case, is the distinction between effect and affect.

But just when you think the vibrato has become total schmaltz, a clean, clear note can resonate: a luminous patch of yellow in “Dime Detective” (2002–07), an unexpected dab of turquoise in the obsessively wrought Tower of Babel scene in “Apex” (2003–04). You thought you knew better, but you are seduced anew.

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Ophrah Shemesh shares with Mr. Lees a predilection for Italian primitives and distressed surfaces, not to mention protracted engagement — all her works on view at Freight + Volume are dated “2004–07.” In Ms. Shemesh’s case, the Italian primitive touchstone is in fact a very recent exponent, Francesco Clemente. Unlike the layered bas-relief textures in Mr. Lees, Ms. Shemesh’s surfaces are washed and scraped to an ethereal, dissipated, almost anemic haze. Her paintings — in oil and egg emulsion on linen — have the aura of faded fresco.

Ms. Shemesh portrays psychologically intense relations between male and female figures. Her titles reflect the philosophical distinction, espoused by Martin Buber, between objectifying and humane relationships described in the contrastive pairings of I-it and I-thou. “I-It” depicts a winsome blonde extending a cup and saucer toward the viewer; “I-Thou” depicts (dubiously, for a non-objectifying relationship) perhaps the same girl with two fingers, shaped like a revolver, pushed into her mouth, her eye caught in profile looking up to her aggressor pleadingly. “Between Thou and It” places a naked woman vulnerably before a uniformed man, while in “The Man to Whom I Say Thou,” an enraptured woman has her hands unconvincingly bound before her in red ribbon, a man resting his face impassively on her voluptuous shoulder.

These kinky scenarios correlate with painterly dualities. The figures loom large in spare, expansive canvases, placed against monochrome grounds. The composition and open forms tend to compress the picture plane, but specific facial features, particularly of the women, tighten into expressive knots to create isolated pockets of convincing volume. There is an element of cartooning in the schematic figures, but at the same time, there is a tenderness that makes for credible human presence.

Lees until April 5 (541 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-2772).

Shemesh until March 29 (542 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-691-7700).