A Mark Greenwold exhibition is almost as rare as a Mark Greenwold painting — the fantasy realist is so exacting and meticulous in his technical demands on himself that he produces hardly more than a painting or two each year. Consequently, the 10-year survey at DC Moore of 18 panels (he paints with oil on wood, in keeping with the tight, precious, highly wrought Northern Renaissance feel of his work) includes only a few images that have been exhibited before. He is also showing supporting studies on paper, another rarity for this artist.

The paintings are as psychologically intense as the execution is labor intensive. For a precedent for this mix of menacing strangeness and correlative fanaticism, it might be necessary to go back as far as the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, although the American 20th-century painter Ivan Albright also comes to mind.

Staffed by images of the artist himself, who is unflatteringly frank in his self-depiction, and a cast of characters identified as his girlfriend, Lucy, and his best friend, who is Lucy’s ex-husband, along with family and colleagues, the works depict characters as naked, shrunk to midget size, or transmogrified into animals — real or mythological. And they are caught in positions as variously compromising as embracing, floating midair, or threatening each other with knives.

“Why Not Say What Happened” (2003–04) shows the best friend smiling inanely, seated on a bed with his hands clasped to his knees. Lucy looks in a mirror, her reflection staring at the viewer. Mark, wrapped in a towel, is in a state of bemusement or rapture. Each party has a thought bubble made of abstract shapes in brilliant colors: Lucy’s is in the language of a James Siena. A fourth human face, meanwhile, looks up to Lucy smiling like a dog, only from the body of a menacing looking, dog-sized insect.

Mr. Greenwold’s paint application entails tiny dots, or minute strokes, painstakingly built up to a dense yet luminous pitch. This is not in the vein of pointillism — the dots are too fantastically close and built up to immediately register as divided, and they do not, as in, say, a Seurat painting, coalesce on the retina. Instead, they are like minuscule pixels of a color photograph. Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude. Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all. It is tempting to view the artist himself at the center of his dramas — nudity and ubiquity demand that — and yet, in terms of the absorption or directional gaze of the various personae, that is not to be taken for granted.

Take “You Must Change Your Life,” (2001–02), for instance, which perhaps takes its title from the final line of Rilke’s sonnet, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Much of the attention in the left half of the picture is taken up by a pietà arrangement of a white T-shirted male in the lap of a distraught woman. A young girl also looks on. But another couple, their heads and arms floating at the ceiling, is locked in mortal combat with a kitchen knife. And two man-headed creatures — a mouse and an insect — are unperturbed by either incident. Because of the tight purposiveness of the way it is made, everything seems to have intense and specific meaning. Yet the symbolism can only mean something to the artist, or perhaps to his intimate circle.

In past shows, there has either been a single painting, or else Mr. Greenwold has curated his newest piece in the company of other artists he admires, and the show has been organized around a common theme. For confirmed fans of this studied eccentric, this show is therefore important. But there is, it must be said, a loss of mystique in seeing this many paintings together — the preciousness experienced in one or two works simply becomes Mr. Greenwold’s mode when seen en masse. And the drawings add little, as they are entirely preparatory and not of particular value in themselves.

While it is good to take stock of Mr. Greenwold’s extraordinary achievement, he needs his singularity back.

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In terms of sheer nuttiness of effort, Mr. Greenwold and Dawn Clements, showing at Pierogi Gallery, are soul siblings. Ms. Clements, in her second show at this leading Williamsburg venue, continues a practice based on obsessive drawing in ballpoint pen — among other media — on irregularly joined-together sheets of paper. There is an energetic contradiction between the intimacy of her touch and the mural-scale of her conjoined pages, which in several works in this show cover whole walls or corners of a room. The gaze is at once enveloped and engrossed.

In some respects, however, the two artists contrast despite the commonality of their obsessive touches. Where Mr. Greenwold works with entirely private narrative material to create tight, contained dramas, Ms. Clements is drawn to the most public and collective of fantasy narrative — cinema and television — to make works that are open-ended in their sense of dissolution.

Mr. Greenwold places his scenes in domestic interiors culled from interior design magazines of various vintages, but somehow makes you feel that his characters, or at least the artist himself, belong there. Ms. Clements, on the other hand, draws her own space, or works from rooms observed in movies, but her hypnotically spindly line and absorption in detail have the effect of undermining her emotional involvement with these spaces. She becomes so lost in the otherness of what should be familiar that drawing, far from ensuring intimacy, entails a kind of dissipation.

Working from different perspectives accentuates the open-endedness and fragmentation of her scene. At more than 22 feet in width, “Dining Room and Grand Stairway (Titanic, 1953)” (2007) unfolds like a Chinese scroll, registering as a spread-out panorama, as if the end might join up with the beginning. The eye wandering along these shifts in scale and different degrees of isolation can feel like a movie camera constructing a sense of a unified space from fragments of scenery. Cryptic time notes indicate moments in the movie from which these parts of the ship’s interior were reconstructed.

As well as her sprawling, extension drawings, Ms. Clements also shows a salon-style hang of individual drawings of characters from movies and art history, mostly female, worked in densely woven accumulations of line in ballpoint pen, such as “Mrs. William Sutton (Whirlpool, 1949)” (2007). Where the figuration in the large-scale works, such as “Color Oval” (2007), have an outsider naïveté (the siren-like female figures recalling Richard Lindner), these individual portraits have the tight allure of vintage illustration or fashion plate art. In either case, there is a melancholy mix — recalling Elizabeth Peyton — of investment and nonchalance, obsessively worked and yet not quite there, that speaks to the peculiar alienation of mediated infatuation.

Greenwold until November 10 (724 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-247-2111);

Clements until November 12 (177 N. 9th St., between Bedford and Driggs avenues, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-599-2144).