Installed near the desk, the startling “Nest” (2005) introduces Christian Vincent’s first exhibition of paintings at Jason McCoy. With a vibrant combination of reddish ochre and umber tones, the artist has uncannily captured the effect of light on the bare back of a woman standing waist-deep in a flowery field. Adorning her hair, a garland of flowers gleams with exuberant pink highlights and scarlet shadows. The controlled modeling and offbeat, suggestive imagery are familiar from Mr. Vincent’s previous shows at Forum Gallery, but the colors of the iconic figure in “Nest” have a new, radiant presence.

“Nest” is the most impressive of the 12 paintings here, but there are other notable works, including several untitled portraits from 2006 that deftly sum up a young girl’s expressions. In the most effective of these, the model tilts back in a compact composition, her casual gaze fixing us from a point between rich, contrasting curves of hair, jaw, and brow.

The titles of several larger figure compositions clarify — or at least elaborate — provocative scenarios.”Narcissus” (2005) depicts twins standing in a field of daffodils, their bodies curving in perfect symmetry toward an empty point in space. In “Capture” (2006), more than a dozen identical young women reach longingly upward toward a cloud of butterflies. In these canvases, the adventures of composition tend to fall short of the storytelling ones: Faces again are persuasive, but in pictorial terms the somewhat pallid bodies, garments, and backgrounds seem like afterthoughts. One has a sense of painted faces and illustrated scenarios — a situation that may not distract every viewer, but will remind others of how Goya and Daumier make painting entirely consistent with commentary.

More compelling is “Rope” (2006). In this large canvas, several nude figures clasp one another in a column of flesh extending the canvas’s height. What startles isn’t so much the exotic notion as the vividness of its realization. Pressures of colors make the human column eerily close at hand, while bold, glowing diagonals of pink — a snow-clad mountain range at sunset — divide the background’s intense blues and purples. Flesh tones have just the right density to express the suffusing glimmer of dusk. The dual traversals of the canvas — vertical, clambering flesh, and sloping horizontals of snow — summon the kind of drama available only in paint.

In a time of outlandish techniques and ideas, the paintings of Giorgio Morandi continue to engage us, possibly because they are so resolutely the opposite: an art of immense modesty and interiority. Paul Thiebaud’s intimate exhibition space turns out to be the perfect fit for eight gem-like works, all but one titled simply, “Natura morta (Still Life).”

As artifacts, Morandi’s vases, bottles, and bowls are unexceptional, but as shapes absorbing and reflecting color they have numberless possibilities. In a painting from 1941, the artist has shepherded them into a simple configuration that allows a patient scrutiny of light. Seven pale, thin bottles and vases are lined up to fill the canvas, with the back edge of the table gently curving to accentuate their frontal grouping. Overlappings show slight, constant shifts in their distances from the viewer.

It takes a few moments to realize how fully colorful this painting is. Objects that at first seem uniformly gray begin to glimmer with unique hues: pinkish, barely yellow, or tinted with a hint of violet. Slight variations in the greenishbrown background lend it a palpable depth; it practically flows about the objects. Technically modest, this silent world has a dynamic poise worthy of Chardin.

In an exceptional painting from 1955, one can trace the passage, across a vase’s spiraling flutes, from bright highlight to the deepest shadow of a cup’s rim. The background darkens slightly to receive the rising neck of the vase, and the table counters by subtly darkening where it meets the vase’s opposite contour — and again, one experiences that remarkable equilibrium of pressures.

Morandi’s deliberations can sometimes seem a little quaint — when, for instance, he all too conspicuously lines up the contours of objects and table surface. And that whisper of a difference between the off-whites of vase, table, and background in a still life from 1953: Covering 90% of the surface, they play with the essential flatness of the canvas, but surely the viewer is already onto the fact that painting is a spacious language of flat illusions.

Elsewhere, two extraordinary drawings reflect the quickness of observation that underlies most of his paintings. In one undated graphite sketch, the artist has laid in rapid crosshatched tones to show a jug curving, with momentous care, above the corner of a carton. Morandi doesn’t indicate the jug’s other half at all, but the viewer immediately understands from the handful of tones that its contour simply melts into the background. Below, a few horizontals suffice to locate a deep recession in space. The phrase may be clichéd, but here it’s entirely apt: Rarely do such humble means produce so monumental an effect.

Vincent until October 28 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-319-1996). $15,000–$125,000.

Morandi until October 28 (42 East 76th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-737-9759). Work not for sale.