LA CIENEGA AREA

Back when the enlightened rich had their living rooms painted by artists, the result was a fanciful scene or a deft passage of pure design. Renee Petropoulos links those days to ours by painting three gallery walls in a way that mingles the decorative vegetative forms of Art Nouveau with a 20th-Century sense of dislocation.

On a field of purple, thick, curving green stems and thorny, bent and spiraled branches overpainted at intervals with bland red dots are joined by enormous fleurs-de-lis, a convoluted shape like a fancy table leg and an ethnic basket in flight. On the facing wall, a Vienna Workshop-like pattern of big blue and yellow fan shapes is zapped with varicolored vertical bars.

The center wall, painted a streakily uneven red, offers three circular shapes in awkward asymmetry; they sit uneasily like pieces of an unsolved puzzle.

Marc Pally’s work on paper has a prickly, hermetic quality that initially walls the viewer out.

He favors knobby, organic forms, some invaded by concentric layers, others gnarled, leaflike or dreamily expansive. Granted more than a casual glance, these variously crabbed and lyrical creations begin to suggest something of Dylan Thomas’ “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.�

Using a fistful of different media in each drawing, Palley mediates between obsessive detail and limpid, elemental shapes.

In “Milestone,� a massive black erupting shape shares the paper with a cluster of white berrylike forms, big fronds lined with veins, a plant with a delicate tangle of thin roots and a minuscule table on which tiny articles of clothing draped over a box assume puppet-like form. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Sept. 5.)