Nicolas Ceccaldi at Édouard Montassut

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Fan art quickly leads to the extremes of content. At one end you have the pure libidinal energy of slash fiction / rule34 / sonichu into the deepest depravity of desire. At the other end you have the desire to elevate, make "cool" and consumable and you see Shepard Fairey storm troopers and pencil drawings of Darth Vader measured in hours of work. While the latter only serves as offering to valorize its master the IP - the pervert instead steals the content and moves it into their own playpen. For instance Puppies Puppies unauthorized public-domaining of the today's modern epics (Spongebob, LoTR) - treating them as oral traditions that can be used for our own purposes, fuck The Mouse, and create our own worlds, rather than eternally paint pictures of our tourism in other's properties. This not being the druids we're looking for. 

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Meyer Kainer

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Joker was happy to stick the multiple prongs of its fork into multiple political hot sockets and see sparks. For reasons seemingly not much more than to see those sparks; political hot buttons becoming their own form of Hollywood special effects. The film's patheticness against its grand ambitions seems to mirror the main characters own, a sort of filmic meta-pathos. Identifying not with the joker, but the losers who paint pictures of the joker.

"becomes impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs."


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Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium

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"Within the context of the present exhibition, the satanic motif exceeds the framework of occultism to become a kitsch allegory of artistic practice as professional activity."

Like LaVey's Satanism rebranding Randian Objectivism with dark panache for its target audience of misguided white kids, the indulgence of style seems the point, the running theme throughout Ceccaldi's: oversaturation of "content," a new version of camp: "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical."  It's an blanket you put on things to make them appear new. You put dark fairy wings on young children, attach biomorphic toy-parts to video cameras, remake Beethoven with the signs of the dungeon dweller, paint it black and turn it upside down and suddenly people react to the affect rather than any individual content, which you can't see behind the hollow overlay.


See too : Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Real Fine Arts

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Ceccaldi repeating the wearables. In the original exhibition their lightness and precarity made even the survey of their fragililty feel impure. We dirtying their weight with our unclean sight, merchandise to decor the human like a Christmas tree. Projecting the missing bodies these were meant to adorn. Now the slightly more ruined adornments bear what is implicit prior: their decrepitness in sight, commodities decorating what should be free.



See too: Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

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Ceccaldi now making paintings like high-school students from the internet, and Uddenberg's physically manifesting advertorial fetish for both tech and flesh in cyborg refresh to Allen Jones, all the odder for their ambivalence.  Both engaged with embodying cultural representations (which might explain the odd cardboard modernism) where identity is emergent from cultural signs rather than any sort of inherence, becomes currently impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs. Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself, rather than the artifact of some dirty boy's head.

See too: “About Face” at Kayne Griffin, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant

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After an early homerun hit of Ceccaldi's surveillance child-things, we've had at least two bunts and now this walk from an artist that was rookie of the year not so long ago.

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

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In terms of the surveilled children’s toys of Ceccaldi’s past, this is it at its most literal. The big HAL-eye of an Orwellian god’s omniscience. The precarity of the wearables and our own survey of them felt fragile and impure, dirtying their weight with our unclean sight. This PR’s hamfisted Biblical rhetoric, blackened eyes, and spooky theater attempt some pagan significance but its toys themselves which speak so well addressing the latent culture and not the the Nightmare Factory branding it, perhaps brilliant in its overdoneness.


See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Danny McDonald at House of Gaga