When Robert Rauschenberg featured an iconic photograph of JFK and Andy Warhol did the same with dozens of Marilyn Monroes in his work, we suddenly noticed the daily deluge of images we paddle through. But now that using found images in art has become ubiquitous and multipurpose, it no longer automatically directs us to symptoms of a speedy world.

In fact, found images are part of an intimacy in ROY TOMLINSON's paintings (at Gallery 16, 1616 16th St., through May 28. M-E 9-5. 415-(326-7495). These subdued works don't recall mechanical reproduction, but an imperfect human version of it. They evoke the beauty of our inadequate attempt to create regular, repeated, elemental patterns with memory and our hands.

In order to work contrapuntally to his painterly habits, Tomlinson often scans images into a computer and loosely manipulates them. The Berkeley resident uses the rearranged images as models for his paintings. Checkered and floral designs from clothing and the simple crosses, grids, and swooping lines of old buildings and grills are recycled as products of both industry and the artist's imagination.

Several paintings in the show feature a technique new to the painter. (Gallery 16 invites its artists to take advantage of the neighbors across the hall, state-of-the-art printers Urban Digital Color.) He lays a digital print of an image directly onto a wood panel, then scratches it with pads, swathes it in paint, etc.

Whatever their underlying technique (and they don't require you to think about it), the paintings play with patterns. A limited but nuanced palette of gray, charcoal, slate blue, sienna, beige, and rose streaks, flecks, and smudges the paintings' own designs. They express a series of human desires indirectly, without the most efficient tools (words, bodies, actual motion). In one painting, tar-black bands stretch over a sepia print of stone flowers. The flowers look solid, untouched somehow by their brown veneer, which is fuzzy and worn away in patches. Safe from the scruffy, unreliable present, the flowers are preserved in time that doesn't move. They make us nostalgic for what we know never existed.

The largest painting's wide checkered pattern, squashed to resemble diamonds, is set diagonally on the canvas. Like window mullions in disrepair, some of their charcoal sides are missing, and sometimes the charcoal spills into the mild beige panes, and often smudges of light rose meant to highlight the squares don't appear at all. But these transgressions pale next to the fact that the whole pattern is misaligned three times along the horizontal, the lines jogging slightly as if the pattern had been cut up and then hastily pasted down again. The painting resembles something made with only fallible memory as a guide.

Tomlinson is a master at getting his curving lines and round blots to recede into and project out from the canvas' surface, without benefit of the usual perspectival devices of representational painting. In a painting that evokes long tresses of hair or earth-toned fire, black lines merge with white lines and are eventually overwhelmed only to wave up again as if they'd been there all along. Though the lines hint at gesture and their colors are more subdued, they're beautiful like Morris Louis' streaks of color: they feel inexplicably right. But in the context of a show where so many works are palimpsestic, this painting does more than simply deeply please. While it doesn't share the same evident patterning as other works, it illuminates something crucial in them: they use space to remind you of time - how it feels to watch it take its own course even as you stand in the middle.