This doesn't seem be documented anywhere, but reading from files requires special logic. The only commands that have variants implementing this special logic are {PTR}, {PTR}r, and Copy(PTR1,PTR2,SIZE).
In your case, you'd need to copy the sprite out of the file and into a buffer in RAM, and then display the sprite from that buffer. Note that this will add some major overhead if the file is in fact archived; it'll make displaying an 8*8 sprite take about twice as much time.