 Hip, without forgoing tradition In the au courant climate of South La Cienega Boulevard, the pair of exhibitions now at Kim Light / LightBox have an anomalously — and appealingly — old school air, with contemporary concerns grounded in decidedly traditional methods. The two front galleries contain the paintings of Samantha Fields: dramatic skyscapes rendered in meticulous airbrush on mid-sized canvas-covered panels. Fields gathered the images with a camera — storms, fires, sunsets and spectacular cloud formations encountered on a recent cross-country trip — and reproduces them with lush, photographic accuracy, exploring the romantic tradition of the sublime as well as contemporary fears of environmental apocalypse. Whether the works go so far as to "catapult landscape painting beyond the rehashing of art historical styles," as the news release suggests, is questionable — if anything, the thinness of the airbrush inspires nostalgia for the rich, choppy surfaces of a Constable or a Turner — but they're gorgeous paintings nonetheless. Equally rousing though far more modest in scale are the ceramic works of Adam Silverman, in the project room and back office. The roughly two dozen vessels, the largest of which is no bigger than a basketball, combine clean, thin-walled, traditional forms — round with a narrow neck or columnar — with thick, expressive, richly organic glazes. The craftsmanship is exquisite. Some have smooth, dark surfaces, with pale drips running across at unexpected angles. Others have rough, crusted surfaces, resembling dried foam. Others — my favorite — are clean, elegant, matte gray vessels partially coated with a lumpy, earthy, glossy, green-brown glaze, thick enough to serve as a sculptural element in itself. The contrast between the high refinement of the vessels' lines and the mad unruliness of the glaze brings two opposing veins of ceramic practice into a masterful and deeply absorbing balance.
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