WILSHIRE CENTER

Scale isn’t all with Roberto Gil de Montes, but it’s woefully important in his current show of big and little paintings. More often than not, the small works rattle and shiver with a magical charge, while large ones make him look like one more Neo-Expressionist.

When he condenses the impact of a “Night Train,” sets a “Salsa Man” to dancing, casts a drama against a molten mountain or pits himself against an ocean liner--all in thickly impastoed little paintings encased in heavy, dark frames--he presents quivering chunks of action that draw their authentic strength from apocalyptic terror and Latino culture. In the larger paintings, this energy generally dissipates. A painting call “Urban Christ” and the frame of “The Receptor” (carved with snakes and a tug of war) suggest that it could be otherwise.

Concurrently, Barbara Edelstein’s “Romantic Notations” installation wraps the back gallery in corrugated metal. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes before walking behind a floor-to-ceiling metal curtain into a space that tends to recompose itself in human-scaled vignettes against a natural backdrop. This experience is accompanied by Jeffrey Rona’s music (a free-floating composition of four tape loops of unequal length played continuously).

Edelstein is no beginner, but her installation amounts to a debut for her. It’s her first opportunity to build an environment of corrugated metal in a gallery, and the opportunity wasn’t wasted. Apart from distracting lights poking their unwelcome heads through spaces in the ceiling, “Romantic Notations” is a mature work of art, evocative in its reverberations and visually satisfying. She has handled an extremely recalcitrant material with grace, effectively using its rippled surfaces as rhythmic reflections and ameliorating its industrial frigidity with torn openings, ruffled edges and copper sculptural forms that refer to figures. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to April 27.)