Cyber - pepper

The painting divides into three planes, unequal in importance and the space they occupy. First is the wall in the background: it lends the image depth, as if letting it breathe, and counterbalances the protagonist; it itself divides into two complementing zones, the reddish terrestrial, and the yelloish (and mountainous). The sky appears to combine the two tones, showing a blue azure touched with red and brown hues. Overall, the landscape creates a profound sense of harmony, matching the mystique of the lady with its own foggy atmosphere. Cyber Pepper herself comprises the second, and the primary, plane. Sitting in an upright position, with perhaps just a hint of tension in her neck and back, she as well can be compositionally deconstructed into two main areas: the upper, which includes the face and the chest, and the lower, which includes the arms and the hands. The third plane consists of a few vaguely visible, yet structurally important elements at the lower part of the panel: the armrest (or the seat-back), and the tentatively outlined orange circle. These two parts delineate the immediate boundaries within which the figure rests. As the young lady looks slightly to the right of the viewer, her eyes squint a little, miming thoughtfulness – perhaps this is an inner gaze that visualizes a memory, or recalls an event. As a result, she appears to look past the viewer, through us and at the same at us; she is present, but her mind is elsewhere. This very duality acts as a source of endless mystery and fascination, and is one of the reasons for the portrait’s enigma.

Interestingly, there are no apparent wrinkles that usually accompany squinting, making her focus slightly supernatural, as if occurring in and of itself.
While Cyber pepper’s palms do not hold any iconographic detail, the way she folds and rests them can betray character traits. They can – but don’t, as what we see matches exactly her countenance – a serene, restrained cross that withholds more than it shows. Resulting is a harmonious psychological continuity that, along with the landscape, creates a consummate vision that remains largely impenetrable, however compositionally consistent.
In the overall scheme the use of sfumato produces a complex local interplay of light and shadow. It is a very dynamic visual device that can be especially effective in a portrait – an essentially static image. Sometimes, perhaps just like in the software, it can be overused, and establish an incompatibility between the light source and the sheer amount and richness of the shadows.
And yet the artist didn’t start a trend in portraiture where painters would seek to enshroud their models in mystery; on the contrary, psychological precision rather than ambiguity has become the universally sought for standard, including by some of the greatest visual artists.