Joe Fyfe seems to bask in a black sun of contradiction. At once a brutalist and an aesthete, he is an iconoclast with a profound sense of tradition. His paintings exude nonchalance and finesse in equal measure. They are typically made from unruly scraps of burlap or jute, the lumpenproletarians of canvases, and sport marks so embedded within their rough support that they hover between foundness and intentionality.

His latest solo exhibition with Jay Grimm (the first since Mr. Grimm’s gallery became a satellite of James Graham & Sons) consists of works made during a period in Vietnam, where he has been writing extensively about the contemporary art scene. The Brooklyn-based painter is a veteran internationalist. As a curator, he is known for bringing New York attention to the new French abstraction that, like his own work, grows out of the historic avant garde Support-Surface group from Nice. Indeed, he vies with James Hyde for the honor of being that movement’s honorary consul in America. His latest works are also strongly reminiscent of Alberto Burri, the Italian painter known for his sewn-together, distressed shards of sacking.

But unlike Burri, with his postwar existential angst, Mr. Fyfe seems constitutionally incapable of theatricality. However rough they are at the edges, his images are always inflected with a double sense (contradicting it and each other) of the sensual and the ethereal. As usual with this artist, an initial impression of almost insolent sameness quickly gives way to its opposite, voluptuous variety. In some pieces, forms seem pregnant with consideration: a small, almost votive untitled canvas of last year, for instance, hanging in the back office, positions two leaf green hollow squares and a minute dot in the same hue below with almost tantric significance. In another, “Scattered Stones I,” (2004) there’s the feeling of Chinese painting, of form achieved through an enlightened sense of indifference.

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At first, Mary Heilmann seems to occupy similar territory as Mr. Fyfe: she’s an abstract painter with anti-formalist attitude. There’s an “in yer face” quality about her nursery colors, cack-handed grids, and doodly delivery that gives a positive first impression: cocksure and zestful. The left panel of her diptych “Hokusai,” (2004) incidentally, is strikingly like work by Mr. Fyfe – who is Ms. Heilmann’s junior – from a couple of shows back. There might also be some shared influence with Mr. Hyde, for whom painting has also naturally segued into fun (to look at, if not sit on) furniture: they share a sense of painting as a grand jest. Another reinventor of abstraction she recalls is her near contemporary, Thomas Nozkowski. Like him/her language looks to be built out of shapes and ideas that have meaning for their author without the painting depending on those meanings for its own content.

But somehow, Ms. Heilmann lacks the magic of these artists. The problem has to do with the giant quote marks her paintings carry around with them, like an albatross. In the others there is always a lively dualism between irony and earnestness, whereas the scale, literalness of reference (Hokusai’s “Wave,”for instance),and gimmicky effects in Ms. Heilmann’s work always tip the balance in favor of overtness. When she drips a little paint, as in “Blood on the Tracks,” (2005) or “Jack of Hearts” of the same year, we can hear her chuckling to herself. The painterliness of “Heaven,” (2004), placed in gruesome chromatic juxtaposition with the aptly named “Rude Boy,” (1998) in the rear gallery, is shamelessly fake set against the endearingly handmade quality of the geometric abstraction that is her more familiar mode. There are, for sure, individual passages and effects of wry pictorial humor, like the fuzzy black lattice lines in “Rude Boy” that join up to sharp blue ones within the black square at the center of the picture. But overall, this show has the false cheer and dreary inconsequence of Muzak.

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Californian-born Ms. Heilmann enjoys a considerable reputation in Europe: she was the subject, a couple of years ago, of a solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, for instance. If her phony “Heaven” leaves you hungry for a more earnest evocation of the skies (if not paradise) then check out the German Werner Schmidt’s third solo show with Howard Scott. His attitudinally uncomplicated, if somewhat conservative, abstraction is on its own terms luscious and satisfying.

His favored format puts together four equal canvases each nearly bursting with big, generously loaded but smoothly dispatched brushstrokes. There is painterly action within the strokes and at their edges, while the strong sense of the edge of each self-contained composition animates its neighbors within the grid.

In a rather polite, German intellectual way these works seem to aspire to be, like Goethe, at once classic and romantic: emotion is contained within form by such somewhat earnest strategies as the grid, for instance, and the big, scrawly sgraffito dates. These latter are both a conceptual and compositional device, giving the works a time-based, process oriented, investigative quality fitting to their cloudscape, atmospheric content.

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When it comes to painterly jest, I doubt anyone will outdo Scott Richter. His latest show continues a trademark idiom of sculptures constructed out of paint. Each piece is centered on a piece of mid-century utilitarian furniture: an office desk, for instance, or a wooden palette table, on which are heaped meticulously carved objects shaped from paint. These include a red boat, the sea around it, in the same color, almost dripping over the edge of the green steel table, and a Tatlinesque Tower of Babel-cum-wedding cake in harlequin colors.

Impecunious painters must seethe at the sight of these piles of pigment. In “Building Empires” red and white paint is artfully arranged into slabs of meat, as if a pun about art putting meat on the table. Vegetarians and art purists alike will concede this to be a delicious joke about literalism and depiction. As surely as they are crass, gimmicky, and knowing, they are equally smart and cute.

Fyfe until April 23 (505 W. 28th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-564-7662). Prices: $1,800-$8,000.

Heilmann until April 9 (525 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-255-1121). Prices: $3,500-$95,000.

Schmidt until April 9 (529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 646-486-7004). Prices: $1,100-$18,000.

Richter until April 16, 529 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-463-9666). Prices: $20,000-$25,000.