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Sally Breen's "Cold Water 2" is on view at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett.

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With the annual passing of the film festival finally delineating the end of the summer madness on the East End, the next season always seems to bring a strange atmospheric lull masking the fact that the art scene continues unabated. This can sometimes be somewhat problematic for your run-of-the-mill slothful art reviewer, trapped in a seasonal torpor, yet still drawn by professional necessity to exhibitions that stretch from the western reaches of Southampton Town and Riverhead to Shelter Island and on out to Montauk.

Luckily, for those with an urge for aesthetic input who are not interested in expending much energy (such as the aforementioned art reviewer), it’s incredibly convenient that there are currently interesting group shows at both the Crazy Monkey Gallery and the Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett, which are pretty much right across the street from each other.

At Pamela Williams Gallery, the current exhibition, “Portrait and Presence,” features seven stylistically diverse artists and photographers, with an emphasis on works that lean heavily in the direction of psychological investigations rather than straightforward portraiture.

This is particularly apparent in recent paintings by Melora Griffis, whose subjects, mostly children, have an arresting assertiveness, derived as much from their posture and angle of pose as from any information transmitted from the actual likeness. With the subjects apparently standing in indeterminate surroundings and dwarfed by looming figures that are mostly covered in energetic slashes of paint, the works embody elements of surrealism in their dreamlike ambiance and in the sharp contrasts in coloration and brush strokes.

The impact of surrealism is also prevalent in works by Ivan Kustura, although the effect derives less from the juxtaposition of painterly aspects, as in the case of Ms. Griffis, and more from his arrestingly elegant contrast in shapes and shades.

In “Blind Cowboy,” for example, the figure is all planes and angles, with the artist delineating persona through an accomplished contrast of lights and shadows and then creating an element of surprise in the simple red line that follows the line of the subject’s cheekbone and serves to flatten the image across the surface of the work.

In both “September” and “Zatyr,” by contrast, Mr. Kustura uses perspective and a subtle transition of colors to invoke odd yet also strangely comforting and sensual narratives that are insistently dreamlike and thoughtfully meditative.

The importance of narrative is also felt in the photographs of Victor Friedman, represented here mostly by early works featuring street scenes of 1960s New York that are, by turns, comically bizarre, as in “Coney Island Clown,” and disturbingly unsettling, as in “Man with Mannequins.”

Also featured are works by David Suter, Carolyn Conrad, Alexandra Limpert and Pete Turner. The exhibition continues through November 21.

Meanwhile, at the Crazy Monkey Gallery across the street is a group exhibition featuring Sally Breen, Lance Corey, and Evan Thomas, with the latter listed as a “guest artist.” Mr. Thomas’s portraits of nude women entwined with various snakes simultaneously manifest the obvious suggestive interpretations that such a motif might conjure, but also impart a memorable air of gentility through a powerful use of structure in the works’ figurative correspondence. As a result, while there is an undeniably edgy quality simply in terms of subject matter, in terms of tone the works are surprisingly thoughtful and sensitive.

In “Sam and Helios” (archival digital print), for example, Mr. Thomas uses a sharp contrast in color between the serpent and the model, but the image gains power from the vertical composition and the memorable use of negative space.

“The Cruelest Shoes” (archival digital print), on the other hand, draws on a similar juxtaposition of color as well as a forceful use of dramatic foreshortening in the compositional structuring that seems to allow the reclining nude to recede deep into an imaginary distance. The effect is highly sensuous in the languid mix of shadows and bright coloration and, upon reflection, becomes as much a psychological landscape as a nude study.

There is also highly emotional content in Sally Breen’s seascapes, which are a product of a highly refined balance between color and compositional structure. Where these pieces gain their most powerful resonance, though, is in the energy that is transmitted through the artist’s application of paint, allowing the image of waves and breakers to reflect the poet John Betjeman’s description of “all the sea’s dappled waste/Criss-crossing underneath the sun.”