The arts here may be in better shape than they were given credit for.

It is often said, and has been repeated here, that the Valley is poor in public art galleries.

That statement is full of semantic treachery. As everyone knows, there is much art on public display, whether in banks and business lobbies, in a few commercial galleries on Ventura Boulevard or in murals on freeway and storm-drain walls.

What is meant, of course, is a focal point where people can go from time to time to see art that has presumably been judged by some impartial overseer as new, provocative, meaningful, challenging or perhaps merely nice to look at.

A couple of events over the weekend suggest that the arts here may be in better shape than they were given credit for.

On Saturday night the San Fernando Valley Arts Council held the grand opening of its new Warner Center Art Gallery.

The gallery was created under the wing of business and in an unusual way.

The Arts Council’s executive director, Christine Glazier, had been looking unsuccessfully for a place to start a community gallery when the thought occurred to her that there must be a lot of vacant space in the new office buildings rising all over the Valley.

She wondered whether the owner of such a building might loan her some space, just until it rented.

The first one she asked said yes, Glazier said. Robert Voit, the man who developed most of Warner Center, had a large vacant space on the ground floor of his office building at 21600 Oxnard St.

Voit offered it to the Arts Council on the understanding that the gallery would move on when the right tenant came along.

The first exhibit opened in the summer. Saturday’s opening, though, was the first to be graced by a carpet and properly painted walls (air-conditioning ducts are still exposed on the ceiling), so the Arts Council called it the grand opening.

Three hundred people, including film director Francis Ford Coppola, went to see 50 oil paintings by artist Duncan Regehr. The collection, called “Henge,” was inspired by Stonehenge, the mysterious druid monument in England.

The paintings are all combinations of stone shapes on beige backgrounds with a yellow sun hovering somewhere near the stones.

Glazier described the exhibit as “accessible.” It must have been. About a dozen of Regehr’s paintings, ranging in price from a couple of hundred to almost a thousand dollars, sold on opening night.

Future exhibits will be more daring, Glazier ventured, though they can be expected to stay within the constraints of corporate decorum dictated by the gallery’s location and the ultimate veto power of its patron.

There was no such concern at the opening Sunday of an exhibit called “Translated Visions” at the Century Gallery in Sylmar.

That gallery, in a spacious two-story building in Veterans Memorial Park, was born, ironically, out of the 1976 tax revolt. Before Proposition 13, the building housed a county art center. After the voters approved the landmark property-tax limitation initiative, the art program lost its financing.

Several people, wanting to press on with the meager budget remaining, began putting on art exhibits.

Now two full-time volunteer curators, Cathy Zubia and Ellen Bergan, bring in a new exhibit each month focusing on a theme.

“Translated Visions” features four artists who use different materials to “transform their inner visions . . . into art that is ambiguous enough to tempt the viewer to interpret it.”

About 100 viewers came by Sunday and the artists were on hand to help them interpret.

Sepulveda artist Hal Honigsberg, a young man in a light maroon jacket and cotton slacks, explained that his striking color prints of weirdly shaped rooms and wraithlike human forms are photographs of three-dimensional constructions employing trompe l’oeil to make things look like what they are not.

The figures, Honigsberg said, though they appear to be painted on, are actually holes cut into the constructions.

Orange County artist Suvan Geer made her statements with a more tactile medium.

One consisted of a wooden box, about five feet on each side and four inches tall, filled with red desert earth. Tufts of dead wild grass rose from the outer edges. In the center, surrounded by darker earth where Geer had watered, the green sprouts of living plants broke forth.

On the wall behind the box, Geer had finger-painted a large disk of red mud with 28 notches sheltered by a structure of twigs tied into a grid pattern and partly covered by withered sycamore leaves.

Geer said cheerfully that the grid represented her personal calendar and the leaves past events in her life. The notches represented the days of the female cycle and the red mud suggested blood. Completing the image, a small mechanical timepiece below the disk wagged the seconds off with a mast made of a twig.

What it means, Geer said, is that time proceeds in cycles of life and death rather than in the mechanical ticking of a clock.

Someone will have to water the sprouts until the exhibit closes on Dec. 12. On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t matter.

“Even if they die, it fits with the piece,” she said. “It can’t hurt.”