Judging by her 1902 view of Rubens in the Louvre, the heroine of Colette’s novel “Claudine en ménage” would have a problem with a lot of contemporary representations of the body. “They disgusted me!” she said. “I tried loyally for a good half-hour to work myself up into a state of excitement about them, but no! That meat, all that meat.”

Rubens comes to mind in relation to several current Chelsea exhibitions. It is not necessarily a case of the body being statuesque, plump, or pink. Rather there is a strong sensibility, in contemporary figuration, for classicism subverted. Where the Flemish master added a northern twist to Italian ideals, contemporary artists show a need to fuse a sense of the grotesque or the abject with some received standard of beauty.

But this isn’t just an exercise in denigration. The appeal of beauty is genuine, however camp or deconstructive the strategies of contemporaries appear to be.

Bénédicte Peyrat (b.1967), who enjoys considerable attention in her native France and Germany, opens her American debut at Morgan Lehman today. Her female flesh is all that Claudine feared, though stylistically it is closer to Rubens’s later French admirers, Delacroix and Renoir. Her figures have what could be called, oxymoronically, a graceful awkwardness. This has to do with the way that in their fullness, the figures push their edges out toward the picture surface. Put another way, the artist, hungry for fleshly presence, paints further around the edges than perspectival politeness would allow.

She also paints vaguely grotesque, old masterly portraits, but the main event here is a set of stagy allegorical compositions of figures in landscape. “Ein Hase mit Flügeln ist ein anderes Tier (A Hare With Wings Is Another Animal)” (2002) looks to be a modern-day variant on the ancient theme, the “ages of woman.” A seated nude of median age is surrounded by a clothed older woman and a young girl with a yo-yo. The hare of the title peaks into the composition from behind the nude’s feet. But the work could equally be read as an allegory of painting: The seated woman holds a painterly oil sketch on her knee.

To an art-theory-conscious audience (and Ms. Peyrat lives in Germany, where that is the norm) a hare has connotation of Joseph Beuys’s lectures on art addressed to a dead hare. The gushy, diffuse brushstrokes in the larger allegories also bring to mind Gerard Garouste, the French “Bad” artist of the 1980s who played high jinks games with anachronistic style. Whichever way this allegory begins to read, the artist favors symbolism that, however overt seeming, is hermetically sealed.

The portraits are powerful and evocative, though they too play history games and are coy about their intentions. Mostly untitled from 2006, they include unflattering, masculinizing self-portraits; oddball, anonymous groteques, and what appear to be studies in extreme grimace or dementia. They are an odd mix of painterly relish and remorseless exposure, a look that, though it may sound like Francis Bacon, is more old masterly and postmodern. Her contemporary peers are Philip Akkerman and John Currin, but unlike these artists, Ms. Peyrat offers a mollifying sense of empathy and observation — qualities to appeal to Colette.

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“Les demoiselles,” Cindy Workman’s exhibition of elaborately constructed digital prints, extends the line of inquiry established in her last show at the same gallery. She described the work in “POST porn ISM” as being a “smartslash-sexy way of looking at the whole women-as-object thing.” Her cute, sleazy images of flesh and femininity are artful and kitsch, alluring and repugnant in equal degrees.

Ms. Workman uses digital technology in her large, gaudily colored, unique inkjet prints to splice together layers of female representation. Besides “Blue Nude” and “Pink Nude” of 2007, they are all from her “Large Woman” series of 2006. She principally harvests from two fields: illustrations and cartoons of idealized young girls, mostly culled from the packaging of sewing pattern kits of the 1950s and soft pornography of the next decade. The squeaky-clean innocence of the one and the raunch of the other meld uncomfortably, as they ought. In this respect, technology, artistry, and ideology are on the same page.

This might sound like heavy-duty, old-school feminism, but Ms. Workman’s images are much more ambiguous than critical. The personages have the otherworldly, vaguely occult feel of a late John Graham painting. Butterflies flutter across several prints, reminders that a weird mix of artifice and fleshliness is as prevalent in nature as it is in art.

In a formal sense, Ms. Workman’s is a poetics of misregistration. The video sculptor Tony Oursler is brought to mind by the way she disconcertingly fuses flatness and volume: In Ms. Workman’s “Large Woman 18,” for instance, where breasts hang out of a prim frock and a demure pink arm distends from the black woman’s flesh within.

Peyrat until March 10 (317 Tenth Ave. at 28th Street, 212-268-6699); Workman until March 3 (514 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-941-0012).