Transitory Nature of Posters Humbles Superimposed Oils * Guillermo Bert’s works in the Studio City exhibit juxtapose grace and street life.

Guillermo Bert doesn’t think in a straight line, let alone create imagery that announces its intention in simple declarative strokes. His works, spread out over the upstairs gallery at the Gail Michel Collection in Studio City, are as disjointed as they are graceful, as much about the hurly burly of life in the info age as they are expressions of anatomical forms.

In this selection of pieces, he presents an assortment of animals, sporting types and dancers, rendered in choppy ways on a pulpy surface. What’s beneath the paint, a collage base made from scraps of posters, is of critical importance to what he describes as “attempts to uncover and construct an archeology of the urban landscape.”

The “canvases” made from these poster pieces, salvaged from the walls of Los Angeles, serve as a street-wise counterpoint to the presumed refinement of oil painting. Bert makes no attempt to completely cover over the poster material, but the visible information that we see between the painted areas--a word or a phrase here and there--never amounts to more than fuzzy data. The data itself are not important, but the urgency and impermanence conveyed by posters is.

The Chilean-born artist, who moved to Los Angeles in 1981, has worked in the public before, with murals. Here, he brings public culture--the timely buzz of posters--into the sanctum of the gallery. Bert seems to project, through his art, the keen, curious eye that an outsider can bring to a new environment.

In newer pieces from his “L.A. Sites” series, Bert relies on the kindness of animals, depicted on unevenly shaped canvases drawn with a crude hand that suggests the influence of cave paintings. Rather than deal with identifiably urban scenes in this “urban archeology,” Bert relies on the wistful subject of all-American animalia--horses in both majestic and distressed poses, the once-mighty buffalo, and slightly alarmed looking deer.

Two of the largest works, from his earlier series “The Dance” and “The Olympians,” face each other from opposite ends of the gallery, covering up windows and creating a more enclosed atmosphere in the gallery. It’s almost as if the two works set up a dialectic tension across the room.

In one corner is a sprawling 5-by-8-foot diptych of four dancers creating a wavy arc across the spread of the two panels. Across the way is “The Sumo Wrestlers,” an even larger piece, logging in at 8 by 12 feet, and much more frontal and centered in its compositional presentation. Two massive Sumos locked together, bullish blocks of sinew and matter, serve as anchors in the picture.

All around these human hulks, who seem to be putting their heads together in an almost meditative way, swirls a mild storm of scattered images. Here, as elsewhere in the gallery, posters have been mutilated and stripped from their immediate purpose, while the fine art aspect is humbled.

Bert’s disarmingly charming artworks are deliberately scrappy, but they maintain a strange kind of dignity. Content is neatly woven into the context, as one surface nuzzles up against and interacts with another. One could make a parallel with the ways in which archeology reveals its meaning in layers, and rarely with linear logic.

DETAILS

* WHAT: Guillermo Bert.

* WHERE: Through Oct. 19.

* WHERE: The Gail Michel Collection, 12532 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City.

* CALL: (818) 755-1355.