A Small Drama: Satyr

Mysterious, genre-challenging, and mind-bending, Jim Pearson’s A Small Drama: Satyr is an intriguing digital artwork that exchanges a pen for a mouse. The hard lines of the detailing coupled with the equally amorphous and diffused digital mark-making provide a depth to the work that belies its tree-dimensional nature. While the picture maintains a visual coherency, it is a composite work made up of many images and abstract gestures overlapping each other. Of course, most artworks could be described as such, but A Small Drama: Satyr’s cryptic surface takes this artistic practice of compiling layers of images to new heights with the phantasmagoric forms it holds within. Pearson teases out so many shades of gray from his black and white palette that the viewer can get lost in the tonal complexity of the work to the same degree they could succumb to a kaleidoscopic painting.