LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- Julien Ceccaldi’s first US museum exhibition features a newly commissioned large scale painting that transforms the first-floor MoMA PS1 galleries at an architectural scale. This major work, A Collection of Little Memories (2025), casts visitors into an episode featuring Ceccaldi’s recurring protagonist, Francis, in an elaborate mise-en scène annotating the assembly-line array of sexual availability provided by networked connectivity. Ceccaldi’s exploded perspective on insatiable desire and endless choice uses allegory to exploit his subject’s enthusiasm for the thrill of a first encounter. On view March 27 through August 25, 2025, the exhibition features a selection of drawings, paintings, installations, and animations that document the 21st-century collision of ideals amid lingering conditions of secrecy, competition, and prejudice.
Ceccaldi’s practice also examines the self-fashioning of personal success, idealized beauty, and fairy- tale satisfaction as modeled by celebrity and influencer culture. In contrast to social media distortions of nostalgia for traditional family values, and patriarchal masculinity as paradigm, his work portrays the inconsistency of these archetypes. Burdened by the pressures of convention, Ceccaldi’s characters verge into delusion, anxiety, and more morbid territories, falling to pieces again and again. Their sometimes-endearing innocence expresses a firm belief in the potential for reciprocal love, despite the rapid passing of time.
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, the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and self published works of manga fan-fiction known as Doujinshi— Ceccaldi amalgamates the discomfort, melodrama, and romance of contemporary social life into shrewdly observed drawing, painting, and sculpture. Despite the smooth circulation and brilliant horizon promised by slick media technologies, his work maintains a handmade quality that mirrors the real agony and emotion of his characters. Across materials and in multiple dimensions, Ceccaldi exploits techniques common to both the animation studio and the Italian Renaissance, including trompe l’oeil, overlay, and freeze frame.
As part of the exhibition, a dedicated screening room with bespoke theatrical seating will play original short animations of Ceccaldi’s comics spanning the previous decade, including Less Than Dust (2014), a parable of neglected friendships in the wake of a devastating crush; Human Furniture (2017), the first installment in which Francis abandons unrequited lust for the epic highs and lows of promiscuity; Solito (2018), a dream sequence on the possibility of unconsummated love with a long deceased prince charming; and Tasteful (2024), in which Francis tirelessly explores app-based cruising and extreme honesty.
Julien Ceccaldi (French/Canadian, b. 1987) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Galerie Tenko Presents, Tokyo (2024); Gaga, Guadalajara (2023); Modern Art, London (2022); Jenny’s and LOMEX, New York (2021); and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2018). He has participated in group exhibitions at Institut français du Japon, Tokyo, Le Château, Aubenas, MAMCO, Geneva, and Somerset House, London (all 2024); Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, and Le Consortium, Dijon (both 2023); HEAD, Geneva (2022); Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2018); and the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016). His comics have been published independently and in anthologies, including Simon’s Thumb (Neoglyphic Media, 2024), Freeloaders (2021), Divine Judgement (Mould Map 7, 2019), Solito (Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2018), Human Furniture (2017), and Less Than Dust (2014).
The exhibition is organized by Kari Rittenbach, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
