It’s a truism that every painting is really a self-portrait. This applies, in fact, just as much to abstractions as to representational paintings. Currently, shows of work by two abstract painters reflect the profound differences in their intentions and insights.

At Stephen Haller, Ron Ehrlich’s 10 panels are listed as multimedia works, but this description hardly prepares one for the turbulent surfaces that combine oil paint, oil stick, wax, shellac, varnish, and the odd fragment or two of wood. (For good measure, Mr. Ehrlich applies a blowtorch in places, lending his surfaces a weathered, grainy texture.) As with Clyfford Still, Mr. Ehrlich’s images are arenas of turgid textures, but Ehrlich’s strokes are far more violent, with intense hues imparting a melodramatic depth. His gestures of paint — variously crusted, flooding, slathered, and scraped — seem constrained by only one tradition: a painting’s flat, rectangular support.

In the late ’70s, the artist moved to Japan for five years, where he studied traditional ceramics. This experience resonates in titles such as “Koke” (2006), which refers to an ancient Japanese temple. In this square panel, gray washes drizzle over a background of clotted, lumpy off-whites, lending it the amorphous atmosphere of a landscape scroll painting. More typical, however, is “Shifting Web” (2007), in which a great slash of white, extending corner to corner, cleaves a zone of brilliant, burning red from areas of layered washes admitting glimpses of curling underdrawing.

Mr. Ehrlich’s attack is foremost a tactile one. He animates his images more often through varieties of textures than with hierarchies of forms. I found myself resisting the seductive paint handling in the large “The Taste of Self” (2006), which, despite its highly evocative, varied surface, features more or less equally weighted areas of sienna, ochre, and gray. More dynamic formally is the smaller “Shunyata” (2007), in which wide swathes of off-white, covering nine-tenths of the surface, press upon a mottled purple at the lower edge; A few drips of amber varnish wander delicately down the panel’s entire height, like butterflies through a minefield. Here one savors not just pronouncements but an interior conversation, with actions and reactions, gambits and repercussions.

Best of all is “Wheat” (2007), which, contrary to its title, suggests an eruption of fireworks. Its ragged diagonals and verticals divide an exotic Turner-esque space of heated orange-reds, leaden grays, and acrid blues shades. Effects abound — dashes of light and murky depths — and, crucially, they coalesce in movements leading from introductory gleamings, to boisterous collisions, and a distant release. It’s a memorable light show.

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Mention a painter named Pollock who moved to New York City, enrolled at the Art Students League, and studied with Thomas Hart Benton, and most people will assume you mean Jackson. His older brother Charles, however, preceded him in all these steps, and eventually went on to paint his own kind of lyrical abstractions. Among these are the works in his “Chapala” series, currently on view at Jason McCoy.

Whereas Jackson was brooding and self-destructive, Charles was reflective and patient. Leaving New York just as the art scene was kicking into high gear, Charles worked in Washington, D.C., and later in Michigan, where he taught design, printmaking and typography. By then, he had abandoned Benton’s regionalist style to pursue an evolving variety of abstract styles. He was to outlive his famous younger brother by three decades, spending his last 17 years in Paris.

McCoy’s installation includes work produced during his stay in a small Mexican town from 1955 to ’56. The five oil and tempera paintings all demonstrate an intense, if discreet, investigation of tensions between background and foreground patterns, using a palette of muted blues and earthy oranges reminiscent of southwestern twilight. Their elegant, jostling calligraphic shapes recall the handsome, somewhat decorative work of Bradley Walker Tomlin.

The series of paintings is notable for its pensive progression. In one canvas, the marks are rectangular, and grow fainter toward either side; in another, the cool white of the background interlocks with the foreground shapes, narrowing the divide between object and space. The lively, compact dance of white marks, twisting across the dimensions of “Chapala 7” (1956), makes for an especially intriguing image.

Seven ink drawings produce a similar effect, layering crisp black strokes over fine crosshatchings that gather and spread in pulsating fields. Two of these, in an unexpected demonstration of the artist’s appetites, become highly curvaceous forms of female nudes.

For the most part, though, these works present the artist at his most urbane. Later, Pollock would turn to broader compositions exploring figure/background relationships in bolder, starker terms.

It’s impossible to look at these serene works without considering the tragic context of Jackson’s death, coming as it did shortly after Charles’s return from Mexico. We’re left wondering at the remarkable family that produced such different sons, one that tested the extremes and grasped for the transcendent, the other the very model of perseverance and reason.

Ehrlich until April 10 (542 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-7777);

Pollock until April 21 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-319-1996).