Wilshire Center

Richard Nonas’ steel sculptures wander through 12 rooms of the vast Ace Contemporary Exhibitions galleries with a child’s boundless enthusiasm. Large beams of solid industrial steel laid end to end, overlapped, opposed or standing on end are left raw to build a surprisingly diverse encounter with systematic structure.

The various alignments and combinations worked out with the identical units of cold steel are often humorous, occasionally intriguing and can even feel solemn. Seemingly as conceptually pure and systematic as Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, Nonas uses space with more feeling. Pieces like “Woman as Powerful as a Zoo” and “Right Man Wrong” go past the structural formality of the forms to seem almost narrative.

Roger Herman’s large, mostly black and white paintings resemble enormous block prints made of Baroque iron work from the old quarter of New Orleans. All active swirls and painterly flourishes building a web work of lacy lines, they seem in sharp contrast to the graphic simplicity of the black flower paintings and the cast concrete “Monkey Sculpture” in a nearby room.

The monkeys in particular are overwhelming, both in size and in the sense of antiquity they convey. The simplified shapes feel both animal and human and have the primitive force of the monolithic figures on Easter Island. They stand with a similar uncompromising silence letting their fragmentation and irregular placement suggest the finality of time and the futility of evolution.

In several other rooms are the three panel paintings of James Hayward. These large glowing triptychs using color applied in thick swipes would have been right at home in the 1985 County Museum of Art’s “The Spiritual In Art” exhibit, basking as they do in the iconography of pure abstraction. There is nothing else here but the muscular painted surface and sharp color. Yet there are a surprising number of associations generated by the simple formula of a central panel in one color flanked by two panels in another. With the quietude of a Zen garden these lushly colored, sometimes metallic, surfaces recall placid landscapes and moving waters. Perhaps it’s the way the choppy surfaces catch the light or the way the colors evoke certain memories, but each composition exudes its own depth of feeling. (Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., to Dec. 1, Richard Nonas to Jan. 15.)