I was considering making a bug report, but I am not quite sure of the actual intent of "\icon". So, suggestion for now, bug report if someone can confirm the actual full purpose of it.
So, as far as I am aware, the only way to show an image on the statpanel is via either using a manually-defined
tag, or \icon. However, this raises a problem, as \icon currently only shows the base icon of an object, with none of it's overlays.
My suggestion is thus; A new version of \icon, which does include the overlays of the referenced object. No idea how feasible it is.