Wilshire Center

The wood frame houses in Richard Sedivy’s big, austerely romantic paintings from the past couple of years are ghostly memories of archetypal country facades. Walls disintegrate into knife-edged strips of paint, windows are unrevealing black pits and the edges of the buildings fade into the tarry blackness of unknown territories under bilious skies. As if offering up a choice of styling for some potential buyer, Sedivy endows the numerous windows of a single house with a variety of subtly inflected framing treatments.

The thinking behind all this becomes clearer in other, more telegraphic paintings that zero in on remnants of buildings. Some are post-and-lintel constructions in which mismatched architectural features segue baldly into flat areas of paint; others are images of single pieces of paint-scarred wood (sometimes embalmed in varnish) that loom as emblems against vague landscape backgrounds.

There is a great hulking nostalgia for the weight of architectural history here, counterbalanced in a surprising way by a cool contemporary dissection of the varieties of architectural experience. Landscape always whispers in the background, sometimes with the feathery density of Old Master foliage, sometimes scoured down to a cold, featureless nub. Intriguingly, Sedivy never quite permits either side of his split vision to gain the upper hand. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 7416 Beverly Blvd., to April 27.)