There’s just a thin scrim between Lee Smith’s paintings of childhood games and that edge of our adult lives which is haunted by unoccasioned fears and inexplicable awe. His medium-sized works, scaled to fit any tract house, deal almost straightforwardly with the covert activities of adolescents. They have a children’s book clarity, an illustrational purpose: all forms are simplified and rendered in strong colors with clear contours. But a bizarre surreality suffuses the images—the children glow around their edges like irradiated lunar-kinder, and their flesh-tones are red, blue, or green. We