Like visions of hell by Bosch or Ensor, Erwin Pfrang's antically congested, primitivistic drawings are jammed with tiny, hyperactive figures engaging in sex, violence and other indecipherable behavior. It is not what they depict, however, but how they capture and hold your attention that makes the drawings so remarkable.
On typewriter-size sheets of good-quality paper, Mr. Pfrang, a German who lives in Italy, improvises all over with a light graphite pencil. Like an introspective jazz saxophonist coaxing every conceivable kind of sound from his instrument, Mr. Pfrang ranges from dissonant scribbling to miniature vignettes of landscape or architecture. Attracted by the intimate scale, you become absorbed by the seemingly artless yet skillfully controlled variability of line.
At the same time, you are teasingly intrigued by the obscure goings-on of scores of comically grotesque little people and the enigmatic objects and symbols scattered among them. Perhaps Mr. Pfrang is mapping the teeming energies of his own subterranean consciousness.
Medium-large canvases depicting totemic figures in a chiseled, Expressionist style are comparatively static and less entertainingly anecdotal. But in a single small picture of a bedroom featuring a copulating couple at the center and dozens of dwarflike men peeking in the windows and capering about the room, Mr. Pfrang's painting is as delightfully alive as his drawing.
