La Cienega

For a decade, New York transplant Mike Berg has dredged up the past. In 1979, he painted late-Renaissance ladies in contemporary landscapes and some years later he painted mysterious interior and exterior architecture that receded in formula Renaissance fashion.

A current show stays on target with spindly, almost comical images of upturned, turn-of-the-century antiques, wiry ornate vines or floral clusters, all sketched so loosely and painted so thinly as to seem like doodles. These careen around scraped, cracking mint-green grounds that look as intentionally aged and airy-fairy as the objects. The most accomplished piece, “Biedemier Chaise in Extremis,” is a fancy Victorian couch plummeting upside down toward an odd landscape of half circles.

Berg’s ethereal imagery seems to be a metaphor for aesthetic obsolescence, for the process by which objects, art styles and people are revered then reduced by time and familiarity into vague caricatures. If that’s the point, then a potent message is tucked inside a wan container. (Gallery 454, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., through May 13.)