Steven Natal’s first solo online release with Cartellino is a reflexive take on the act of representation. The cue for the artist is his own creative process, largely characterized by still life studies using various representational approaches.
MIMIC
Steven Natal
Apr 29 To May 29, 2025
To mimic is to repeat. To repeat is to exist. Imitation is neither choice nor accident. It happens. A gesture, a word, a face, copied, reflected, distorted. You see it, then you do it. Then someone else does it. Then you forget who started it.
These images mimic. Not because they want to, but because that is what images do. They mirror, they shift, they replace. The copy is never exact, yet the difference is almost nothing. A small flicker, a delay, a mistake. That’s where it happens. That’s where the original loses itself.
Who mimics whom? And why? Is it admiration? Obligation? A reflex? A performance? The one who mimics is not in control. The one being mimicked is not in control. It happens. Again and again, until no one knows who they are anymore.
—Steven Natal
In the present series, Natal converses with Aristotleian ideas on mimesis, where imitation is perceived not merely as a natural instinct but also as transformative in its tendencies. For the artist, pictorial representation is a continuous exercise. What is captured by the frame is merely one fragment of the object’s evolution as it moves from reality to canvas.
To this end, Natal presents his works in three acts, each farther removed from a stable and singular reference than the former. Visual interventions suggest motion—pixelating and breaking images into panels, among these. Altogether, the collection resists the fixity imposed by its genre, and imitation is foregrounded as an act both recursive and generative at once.
