WILSHIRE CENTER

Ace Gallery director Douglas Chrismas has moved so often and weathered so much controversy that his operation somehow always seems new. It is hard to keep in mind that Ace has been around since the heady days of the ‘60s and--aggravation notwithstanding--has brought Los Angeles a flow of significant art it might not otherwise have seen.

Ace’s latest incarnation is certainly its most spectacular. Roosted on the second floor of the old, funky Art Deco Wilshire Tower at 5514 Wilshire Blvd., it’s in one of those recycled spaces that often work so happily for contemporary art. This one is a bunkerlike maze of galleries that rivals in size all but the largest L.A. museums. It feels bigger than the Municipal Art Gallery or the Newport Harbor Art Museum and launches itself with half a dozen full-dress solo shows, each of which adds significant insight to the work of a noted L.A. artist.

Roland Reiss takes an old idea of his own and gives it life for the first time. Past attempts at making present-day artifacts function as archeology for the future fizzled because of their miniature scale. Now he presents a room-filling installation of concrete relics of sports events. A great Ozymandius central figure links our sports to the bloody ritual ball games of the pre-Columbian Maya.

Sculptor Guy Dill has never looked better than in five monumental black steel works that find a niche between David Smith and Mark di Suvero, although it must be admitted they are extremely refined for all their size and dynamism.

If the brace of shows accidentally yields any general information about art today, it must have to do with the exquisite high-frequency sensibility visiting itself on art that still cleaves to various modernist ideas. James Hayward continues to make monochrome abstractions in thick buttery impasto. About all that is new here is a mandarin sense of color that makes ABC art almost exotic.

The unfamiliar work of John Eden has such a thin edge to work with in its chairlike arrangements of verticals and horizontals that it cannot quite do what it seems to want in opening optical doors between the geometric and the organic.

Neo-Expressionist Roger Herman paints an empty lecture hall and a series of ruminative views of balconies that make a troubled peace between the emotive and the rational.

Is there a subtext here about an art that feels itself drained of cultural relevance, co-opted into demonstrations of mere virtuosity? If so, it doesn’t bother David Amico, who fills one gallery with sculpture, including a blue canoe, and another with paintings. As usual, each is in a different style, bound together only by his boundless and unreflective skill and energy.

Given Ace’s record of fits and starts, there is reason to withhold the rush of enthusiasm for this place until we see if it floats. (Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., to June 15.)