The first US solo museum exhibition of New York City-based artist Julien Ceccaldi (French/Canadian, b. 1987) features a newly commissioned large-scale painting that transforms the first-floor MoMA PS1 galleries at an architectural scale, casting visitors into a distorted episode drawn from the experience of everyday digital subjugation and hyperconsumerism. Ceccaldi exploits techniques common to both the animation studio and the Italian Renaissance, including trompe l’oeil, overlay, and freeze frame.
With a fatalistic and genre-bending style—influenced by his early exposure to anime that aired on France Télévisions in the 1990s, the transgressive shōjo manga of the Year 24 group, and the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb—Ceccaldi’s work amalgamates the discomfort, melodrama, and romance of contemporary social life into shrewdly observed drawing, painting, and sculpture. Despite the smooth circulation promised by slick media technologies, Ceccaldi’s work maintains a handmade quality that mirrors the conflicting feelings of his characters.