Julien Ceccaldi
MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens
Through August 25, 2025
For his first American institutional exhibition “Adult Theater,” Julien Ceccaldi brings his shōjo manga-inflected drawings, paintings, and reanimated comics to MoMA PS1 in an installation that hints at a fitting development for his practice: social realism. The acrylic wall panels of the mural-scale painting A Collection of Little Memories, 2025, which comes with a set of aluminum stairs, on which one of the work’s muscular figures appears to be walking down (via a trompe l’oeil trick), seems like a perverse take on the genre. The painting depicts the balding noggin of Francis—a recurring character in the artist’s stable—whose comically agape mouth emits a dark plume identical to those of the smokestacks in the background, while generically clad suitors line up to delicately kiss one of his nails (submissive), or toss out their apple core onto him (kingly dom).
Though sly social commentary was a light theme of his already, it becomes clearer here that Ceccaldi’s work is most compelling when it takes cues from an older genre to send up the contemporary pageantry of hopers, wishers, and strivers modeling themselves as romantic lead characters—or, at least, as the most desirable bod at the baths, per another large painting on plywood, titled Pompeii Bathhouse, 2017. Vitrines of drawings provide an endearing glimpse at process—three Post-its serve as quick character sketches—but a room dedicated to presenting lightly animated versions of Ceccaldi’s older comics is the more vivacious area of this compact show. With a style of movement mostly based on panning over still frames, the saucy dialogues proffer quotable one-liners, such as, “Preventing people from knowing who I really am feels incredible!” All are called to be caricatures of themselves instead.—Paige K. Bradley
