Not all that glitters is gold. But nor — moralizers take note — need it be kitsch. The sumptuous hedonism of Robert Kushner is a case in point. These funky, decadent, effulgent decorations are deeply intelligent in the way they are crafted and conceived.

Mr. Kushner’s current exhibition at DC Moore is an essay in opulence. It brings together several multipaneled, decorative friezes, some made as temporary or permanent commissions, which fill the gallery nearly to the bursting point. While the installation of these complex works that originated in, or for, more luxurious surroundings is skillfully handled, the gallery has that surreal feel of a car showroom: filled with roaring beasts craving the open road.

Mr. Kushner’s work is an exhilarating blend of disparate cultural energies: The intense, hot colors and the use of metallics give the work its grandeur and excess, evoking a range of art-historical décor, from Japanese screens to Whistler interiors to the decorative schemes of the Nabis painters in fin de siècle France. With his effects of distressed gold leaf and oxidized liquid copper, he is literally “gilded age.”

But somehow the gaudiness of Mr. Kushner’s palette and his liberal use of glitter work to collide avant gardism and populism, naturalism and artifice, good taste and overthe-top-ness. In these haute bourgeois drawing room decorations, you can hear the raucous vibes of the street.

The show brings together several recent projects. “Seattle Summer Meadow” (2006) is made up of 14 panels, each 8 feet tall, and measures 32 feet in overall width. Seen here as a continuous flat piece, it has been made for the closet of a condominium residence in Seattle and is destined to be chopped up into adjacent screens and doors. “Spring Scatter Summation” (2005), at 7 feet by 46 feet, was made for the niches of a grand music room in a belle epoque country mansion, the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, Mass. It will be a temporary installation there, with the idea that it could eventually work as a contiguous sequence. It is shown at DC Moore along adjacent walls.

“Red Emperor” (2006), at 5 feet by 36 feet, and “Trudy’s Garden” (2006) were made in response to specific gardens — in the first, in the Hamptons, friends planted 3,000 tulips and invited the artist to respond, while in the second, another friend in Providence, R.I., created a “black” garden of dark-hued plantings after years of consultation with the painter.

Different as the circumstances were for each venture — an enticement, a collaboration, a museum exhibition, a domestic decoration — what is consistent is that in each case the instigator seems to have been an active player. Somehow this feels significant, giving these charming, deeply likable works a social dynamic. Being “décor” does not reduce them to passivity.

“Spring Scatter Summation” is the most dense and richly worked of the four pieces. It presents a frieze of flora and foliage against a patchwork of gold and silver leaf, painted strips in copper tone, and fluid areas of paint or oxidization. It is constructed to read as if the botanical details are spirited over a prepared ground: In fact, it is worked in reverse. The plants are made from direct perception, the improvised background supplied later: hard-edged abstraction responding to hard-won observation. And for all the effort, an effortless breeze.

Mr. Kushner plays sophisticated games. The eye absorbs overall sensation but is invited to notice detail, too. The work is too big to take in as a single gestalt, but as you move from left to right something startling happens: Despite the consistent flatness and evenness of the painting, the picture plane rushes out to meet you. At the outset, wildlife is sparse in ratio to the ground, but by the end there is a shift not just of density but of scale — you are in the thick of big flower heads. The experience is cinematic as pictorial logic unfolds in time as much as space.

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Katia Santibañez and Mr. Kushner seem to come from different artistic planets. Where Mr. Kushner swamps the gaze with luxurious textures and renders flora with painterly panache, Ms. Santibañez entices it with a delicate abstract micrography that is as intriguing as it is obsessive. But despite obvious contrasts of scale, projection, and temperature, these artists might just be onto the same subject: the flashpoint of nature and nurture.

Ms. Santibañez makes relatively small, generally square paintings in acrylic on panel. The majority of paintings in this intimate gallery are less than 2 feet by 2 feet, while her pencil drawings never are more than 12 inches by 9 inches. Within these modest parameters, she creates dense repeating patterns that imply infinite continuation while achieving tight pictorial integrity. The marks are often minute, sometimes as thin as hair.

Where Mr. Kushner blows up flora to mural proportions, Ms. Santibañez subjects the world to microscopic investigation. She evokes things that can’t be seen, whether due to scale, such as cell structures, or register, such as sound waves. Sometimes, as in “Grow and Shine” (2006) or “Deepest Passion” (2007), it feels as if lacework or a quilt has been shrunk; other times, as in “More Returns” (2006), in which a microfiber has been blown up to manifest its hidden structure, it is the other way around.

Ms. Santibañez has a touch that is expressive in its very restraint. Her design sensibility is highly ordered, whether serial, symmetrical, or algorithmic. Yet there is always the feeling that she has built her images through linear elaboration rather than having an a priori idea and then filling it out. It is as if the artist has internalized the growth patterns she depicts, which makes sense of the tribal or primitive feel that animates certain images. Her work occupies a place where observation and abstraction meld, recalling the natural order at the origins of decorative pattern.

Kushner until April 21 (724 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-247-2111);

Santibañez until April 21 (317 Tenth Ave. at 29th Street, 212-268-6699).