AROUND THE GALLERIES

John Divola has made inevitable decay a central theme of his photography for more than 30 years, beginning with the influential 1973 series titled “Vandalism,” shot in abandoned Los Angeles houses. Five exceptional new works at Gallery Luisotti return to that imagery, marvelously complicating and confounding many assumptions about photography and art.

The setup is simple: A jet-black circle has been spray-painted on several white walls in an empty house, then photographed. The five pictures demonstrate five different spatial arrangements for the painted mark: a flat wall; a recessed alcove; a wall with space behind it; a wall beneath a window that is actually a mirror, reflecting space in front of it; and, finally, a wall between an interior space and an exterior space, which opens in the distance onto the landscape outdoors.

Divola’s brisk and stabilizing conceptual logic, however, quickly begins to wobble and fall apart. The effect is bracing.

The scale of the black circles can only be determined if enough architectural context is visible within the picture’s frame. The photographs themselves are large-format (44 by 54 inches), endowing them with a painting’s bodily size. The inky blackness of the paint can dissolve into pure white -- a total contradiction -- if enough photographer’s lights have been used to flood the scene. And, oddly, these are black-and-white rooms photographed in color.

Speaking of paint, the window-mirror evokes the old argument about whether painting reflects the world or opens another view onto it. The black spot, meanwhile, sweeps that disputation away: The circle recalls Kazimir Malevich’s pure abstractions from 1915, landmark Russian Suprematist paintings that announced the puzzling dawn of a new world.

First, Malevich painted a black square on a square white canvas. Next, he painted a black circle on a square white canvas; visually, that circle could be read as a black square in simultaneous full-rotation and full-revolution in space. Malevich’s Suprematist art exudes a profoundly secular yet deeply spiritual dimension, recording a personal vision of Creation.

In Divola’s photographs of Suprematist-style black circles in abandoned white buildings, creation and destruction are held in delicate equilibrium. The all-white rooms, redolent of the iconic galleries in which Modern art is conventionally displayed, are tattered and derelict, as if the inhabitants have long since moved on and only squatters (and artists) might remain. “Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence,” said artist Robert Smithson, entropy’s first poet, a generation ago.

But here the black spot lingers, seemingly ineradicable, like the bloody stain on Lady Macbeth’s hands. “Hell is murky,” she wailed in her hand-wringing midnight sleepwalks, unable to shake the psychological torment her actions had wrought. Divola’s series is titled “Dark Star,” a point of light in the universe too faint for direct observation. His domestic ruins suggest social collapse, but these quietly alarming photographs also resonate within our cold cosmos of hidden black sites and secret renditions. They suggest something sinister as well as sad, brilliantly illuminating our conflicted recent history.

In addition to the magnificent “Dark Star,” six vintage photographs from the earlier “Vandalism” series are also on view.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Menace lurks at water’s edge

Brooklyn painter Amy Bennett was born in Maine. In her second show at Richard Heller Gallery, 13 strange new paintings of recreational campsites, “At the Lake,” recall that evergreen locale.

They even exploit the look of vacation snapshots, both in their scenic aspects and the playful nature of their compositions, as well as in their disconcerting surface sheen. Bennett paints in oil on wood panels of modest size -- the smallest are 6 inches square, most are less than 24 inches on the largest side -- but she coats the surface with a slick, polished resin that visually obliterates any mark of the artist’s hand.

This photographic sheen, however, is immediately undermined. Upon closer look, the rustic settings that emerge from the carefully applied paint are toylike. The straightforward brushwork seems jelled in aspic -- human yet remote, touched yet inaccessible, somehow slightly morbid. These landscapes turn out to be still lifes: Bennett first built a three-dimensional diorama of a lakeside scene, then painted scenes from that.

Bennett also uses the watery reflections provided by the lake to compound the mystery. Reflection as contemplation and rumination is mirrored in the water’s surface, which adds an almost hallucinatory edge to the memory of these places. Recreation is refreshment by means of an agreeable diversion, but trouble lurks in this rustic, very American paradise.

A man apparently helping a woman stand up might also be dragging her corpse into the bushes. A group of hunters gathering by the shore possesses a vague aura of vigilantism. A woman on a glowing sandbar seems marooned. A small cabin on a tiny island surrounded by water has the appearance of an almost desperate getaway.

Even a shoreline scene of a matronly woman, “Paula,” standing at a dock seems quietly fraught. A dog on a raft out in the water is man’s best friend, now stranded and remote. These are pictures of loss and alienation, rendered with sometimes overworked but never heavy-handed skill.

Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .richardhellergallery.com

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Wonders leap out of these boxes

Modernist sculpture generally attempted to resist gravity -- to fly free from earthly bonds and restraints as an expression of a new era of dissolving norms. Since the 1970s, New York sculptor Joel Shapiro has reversed that course -- not succumbing to but instead courting gravity as a sculptural partner. His art plays with its pull in an interactive tussle.

One result is abstract sculpture nonetheless endowed with emotive qualities -- with gravity of an affective rather than scientific meaning. A dozen sculptures from the last two years at L.A. Louver Gallery continue that project.

In wood or bronze, most elaborate on Shapiro’s familiar linear forms, which loosely evoke stick figures under stress. But the most powerful work is a new one, composed instead from a dense tangle of 26 thin, milled-wood boxes, some painted black and some left raw.

It stands just under 6 feet tall. The marvelous sculpture is caught between implosion and explosion, between troubling collapse and exuberant release.

The contradictory effect is partly achieved by the arrangement of forms, but it’s also a result of the surprisingly deft use of casein paint. The soft sheen of the unpainted wood stands in subtle counterpoint to the equally soft blackness of the milk-based casein, which absorbs light. The flapping bundle of broad and narrow boxes is masterfully poised.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .lalouver.com

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Draw a line? Nah, just connect

Once upon a time, color and line were thought to be opposing elements in painting’s language, and never the twain would meet. But Lecia Dole-Recio continues to put them in eloquent conversation with one another, in six new paintings and five works on paper at Richard Telles Fine Art.

In the paintings, colored lines vary in width, until it’s impossible to tell the difference between a line and a shape. Dole-Recio piles them up or spreads them out in various ways -- as undulating waves or pickup sticks -- the silvery red or blue color opening up translucent layers of light-filled space.

By contrast, the collages, made from cut paper and corrugated cardboard, turn shape into form. The edges are painted, like Mercurochrome applied to a wound. Dense labyrinths create the illusion of deep if impenetrable inner worlds.

Unlike the muscular lyricism of her small but fine solo show of mixed-media paintings and collages at the Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago, these modest works are contemplative, elegant and refined. They feel completely self-assured and perhaps mark a subtle shift.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .tellesfineart.com