The Brooklyn Rail

Ever love-thirsty, mid-thirties fictional sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw once typed, “Life gives you lots of chances to screw up, which means you have just as many chances to get it right.” A perpetual hopefulness and a phoenix-like knack for revival kept the semi-delusional protagonist agile for her show’s six seasons. The characters in Julien Ceccaldi’s grotesquely flamboyant universe practice a similar devotion to refuse ennui, holding on to their inner vows to find love like lifebuoys.

In Adult Theater, the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in the US, the galleries at MoMA PS1 are decorated with snippets from the lives of a friend’s circle on their quest for “The One,” a path dotted with hook-ups, “situationships,” and heartbreaks. Their emotional precariousness, which fluctuates between self-doubt and megalomania, lays the ground for the Canadian artist’s synthesis of shōjo manga, nineties candy-colored overproduced cartoons, and traditional comic strips. With popped-up eyes and erratic gestures, the vagabond millennials contemplate their next moves and judge their friends’ self-destructive decisions.

Ceccaldi holds a puppeteer-like command on a handful of characters whose lives occupy the edge between glee and grief. The artist’s flat perspective and forthright plots haul an arresting appeal, causing the viewer to crave more details about the before and the after. Not unlike listening—semi-aloof—to a friend’s account of an unsuccessful date, the third-party involvement in the petty drama makes Ceccaldi’s visually meaty palette juicier. In our era of overhearings, second hand embarrassments, and lowkey obsessions, the vignettes of others’ awkward tales allure like catching next table gossip.

With brawny proportions in hyperbolic attire, Ceccaldi’s characters are exaggerated avatars of average Western millennials, not unlike the over-the-top comic relief of rom-coms or actors with impossibly perfect skin in TV ads. They contain a broad span of gender codes, from a generous palette of sartorial choices to bodily features that include razor sharp jaw lines and model-esque narrow waists. As the antagonists of their own melodramas, they rewrite the script with every jab life throws at their wooing pursuits. Egos collapse like Jenga bricks, but the love of your life might still be one swipe away. They date online and dish in person; sex is as an enigma in the silhouette of a hunky torso or a generic online profile.

“Francis” acts like the glue that holds the narrative together across the show’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and a series of films. He is a lanky gay man with long hair and a receding hairline, thick eyebrows, and a delirious obsession with his hunky ex, “Simon.” The lovelorn hero dabbles in a sea of rebounds, while striving to heal his breakup wounds and rebut his friends’ criticism of his dating life. “You mean banging strangers all week is… abnormal?” he says, sobbing, in one of the five videos on view at a room where two MDF benches and a stool have figures drawn on them. Daddy's Little Business Trip (2025) shows a beefy middle-aged man stretching his derrière as wide as the stool’s length. A potential suitor during Francis’s “sexcapade,” he is instead a bandaid for his emotional scratch.

The show’s tour de force, A Collection of Little Memories (2025), is a 120-by-192-inch painting accompanied by an aluminum stair that reaches toward Francis’s massive face. In a state of a slippery daydream, lying horizontally, he is visited by the ghosts of past one night stands, including an actual hooded ghost with a headless beefy body. Sweat drips from the tired dater’s forehead, while his bulging eyes are locked to his own past. Inside his gaping mouth lives a haunting skeleton engulfed in flames that creep toward the yellow sky. One of the guys—sartorially sleek as most of Ceccaldi’s characters are—throws an eaten apple into Francis’s fiery mouth, feeding the beast of blown chances, all the “what-ifs” and “how-abouts.” With an abundance of chances to screw, he is ready to wake up, yet again armored for the next date’s battle.