James Pustorino - Universechild

a suite of busily dynamic drawings completed between 2003 and 2011, synthesizes science fiction, comic books, Abstract Expressionism and psychedelic art, all in the service of approximating the profound mystery of existence.

The drawings offer a scant but mythic narrative about a being born into space, where he struggles to understand his surroundings and purpose. It's the sort of existential crisis everyone inevitably faces, but Pustorino translates that mental anguish into physical upheaval, as this particular being is born, like a star, in outer space, amid planets and darting rockets.

Pustorino smartly collapses the linguistic difference between the "cells" of a cartoon and those that compose our bodies (ligatures of graphic narration and biological composition, respectively), so that the orderly rectangles of a comic strip gradually dissolve into the honeycomb patterns of cells viewed beneath a microscope. Unfortunately for the protagonist of the drawings, there's no tidy -- let alone heroic -- resolution waiting for him at the end. Instead, he goes on floating through a world he cannot understand, as intruding text ("lost," "empty space") heralds his disenfranchisement.