The CUE Art Foundation gives artists chosen by guest curators their debut solo exhibition in New York. Under these auspices, the poet, translator, and art critic Vincent Katz has selected Juan Gomez, a Colombian born in 1970 who has lived in America since he was 20. His figure paintings have a sophisticated goofiness: They are subtle and crude at the same time, with one characteristic feeding the other.

Mr. Gomez paints stick figures in a cartoony way, with caricatured emphasis on erogenous zones: breasts, buttocks, sexual organs, lips. The limbs are extended beyond anatomical credibility, reading like sausages or blown-up balloons. Yet in iconography and form, they connect beyond cartoons, recalling such sources as pre-Columbian sculpture, German Expressionism (the sylvan bathers of Otto Mueller, for instance), and, in their tubularity, Leger.

Naturally, with sexuality and distortion in the mix, Surrealism is a touchstone, too, but there is an absence of violence or a need to shock in Mr. Gomez’s figuration. Despite the seeming misogyny of his absurdist accentuations, these images exude a tender humor, a genuinely lyrical sensuality. You sense a lust for life in the way figures are conceived and executed.

Mr. Gomez’s palette, touch, and humor are blessed with warm brightness. He delights in voluptuous brushstrokes that define light on flesh. His oil paint manages at once fleshly succulence and a watercolor-like transparency. The figures are splayed on a neutral ground, partially cropped, but generally filling the available frame. “100382” (2004) for instance, has the distended buttocks and oversized foot defining the left and bottom edges, the head cropped at the eyes on the top, and only the right edge clear of the figure and her gangly limbs. While flatness gives emphasis to artifice, the figures are purposively modeled. The ability to work like actual flesh and convey credible movement despite the extremity of their elongation brings to mind an artist of very different sensibility – Giacometti.

***

While humor and libido encourage Mr. Gomez’s extrapolations of the female form, Barbara Sandler gives the male figure a bizarre treatment. Her show at Pavel Zoubok continues a long-standing preoccupation with imagery in which collage and realism intersect.

Each of Ms. Sandler’s oil-on-paper paintings consists of an idealized portrait of a young male athlete in somewhat 19th-century tones (think Thomas Eakins), to which collage elements have been attached, cut from materials that have a relatively bright, synthetic palette. The collage elements injure portraits of otherwise alluring wholeness. Ms. Sandler conveys a sense that traditional realism, like the men it depicts, was strong and handsome until unruly collage came along. Yet her collage doesn’t carry out the Surrealist function of depicting way-out, absurdist situations. More disturbingly, it looks like armor or prosthetics applied to protect features that have been grotesquely disfigured.

Ms. Sandler’s early works from the 1990s tended toward overt savagery: Wild eyes and toothy mouths gave a Francis Bacon-like sense of the macabre to her men. Now there is a gentler mood, signaled by the title of the exhibition, “My Funny Valentine.”

The handsome, soulful youth in “Number Ten” (2004) – like Mr. Gomez, she prefers numbers to names for her titles – sports plates on his chin, eye, and forehead, joined by ominous bolts and tubing to his ear and to an exposed section of his breast. This latter gives way to an ambiguous interior filled with an odd assemblage of planes, frames, and materials. This mix of deadpan realism, a jumble of neatly conveyed collage elements and an elegaic atmosphere, brings Italian metaphysical painting to mind.

Unfortunately, the mix of languages (late 19th century and early 20th) is not shocking enough to cause an aesthetic jolt. Ms. Sandler’s meeting of hardware and physique – to connote wounded masculinity, or man as automaton – is tame next to such forebears as Frida Kahlo and John Heartfield. Elegant, nicely put together, and initially intriguing as they are, her paintings quickly seem formulaic and don’t seem to mean much.

***

James Rieck is a realist whose technique seems at first to be placed at the service of a feminine fetish: His show, “Flower Girls,” depicts such subjects as satin gloves, tulips, and bridesmaids decked out in silk and cropped to the chest. There is an acute sense of artifice in terms of lighting and composition, but it is not overtly obvious whether he has worked up his images from photographs or observation. His surfaces, painted in grisaille, are as virginal as his subjects.

Other work, seen earlier this season at the same gallery in a group exhibition, reveled in richly synthetic color and dense decoration. The new restriction in palette accentuates light, which in the chiaroscuro of “Girl’s Satin Glove 2” (2006) produces a retina scorching magnesium glow.

But this is a rare moment of visual excitement. A deliberate blandness, evidenced by the deadpan of his surfaces and the efficiency of his crop, suggests that Mr. Rieck has no interest in presenting himself as a contemporary equivalent of the masters of luxurious material: Sargent, Watteau, Hals. He paints clothes, but with no inherent concern for style; he has none of the panache of Alex Katz, who has painted a whole series of wedding dresses, or Wayne Thiebaud, who captured in paint the erotic sheen of spandex.

Nor does Mr. Rieck have the manic sense of artifice for its own sake that comes across in such artists as Will Cotton, Richard Phillips, or Lisa Milroy. Finally, his grisailles lack the purposeful big-attitude, washed-out dullness of Luc Tuymans. Yet somehow, despite these various shortcomings, he steers his slick banalities in an interesting direction, making images of such vacuous finesse and desexualized voyeurism that, bizarrely, they achieve a state of pure opticality.

Gomez until March 11 (511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-3583). Prices: $800-$7,000. Sandler until March 11 (533 W. 23rd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-675-7490). Prices: $5,500-$6,500. Rieck until March 11 (511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-242-6220). Prices: $6,500-$9,500.