Julien Ceccaldi

La Rose des Vents

2D digital animation video, 1'11, no sound, colour, looped, 2020

IN ORDER TO COMMIT TO REDUCING OUR ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION TOGETHER, THE VIDEO WORKS OF THE MIRE PROGRAMME ARE BROADCAST ONLY DURING PEAK HOURS, FROM 7AM TO 9.30AM, FROM 12PM TO 2.30PM AND FROM 5.30PM TO 8PM. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING AND HAVE A NICE TRIP.

With La Rose des Vents (The Compass Rose), Julien Ceccaldi invites us into a fantasy countryside world. He draws on the world of fairy tales and romantic painters to connect the main character, a young androgynous princely figure, to her environment and the beings who inhabit it. The protagonists all have red hair with a red ribbon, like different variations of the same being. Everything responds to everything, the wind that blow through the leaves of a book, the movements of the character’s hand, the insects’ expressions and adventures. Even the sky and the earth merge in the final tracking shot, in which an insect falls into a river, then sinks into the ground, which in turn becomes a starry sky. This cyclical aspect, which plays with the video loop, refers both to the location for which the piece was conceived – a station where travellers come and go, on lifts that go up and down tirelessly – but also and above all to the repetitive movement of life itself.

Ceccaldi’s peculiar aesthetic synthesises American and Japanese animation. The visual rendering of La Rose des Vents takes inspiration from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), as well as from Tatsunoko’s Konchū Monogatari: Minashigo Hatchi (1970) and Kerokko Demetan (1973). He borrows from them, among other things, the vision of the castle in the distance, the little ribbons in the hair and the symbiosis of being and nature, as well as the stylisation of insects. His animated video, through its line and its theme, soothes the viewer and invites him into a world of gentle reverie stripped of gender stigmas.

Produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain Genève.

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Born in Montreal in 1987, Julien Ceccaldi lives and works in New York. He studied animation at Concordia University in Montreal, where he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009. Ceccaldi first made a reputation for his comics. In his early years, he created self-produced and -distributed fanzines. The graphics and plots of these short stories were strongly inspired by shōjo (a manga genre that is targeted at girls). After appearing on the cover of Artforum in 2014 and following the interest generated by his work at the Berlin Biennale in 2016, the young artist’s work has been featured in many exhibitions.

The androgynous characters from his comics have been gradually found on canvas or in installations. His works speak of desire, fetishism and sexuality. They deal with these subjects openly, while also revealing sexism and the stigmatisation of LGBTQI+ minorities. The protagonists he depicts often seem to suffer from loneliness and are caught up in complex love relationships. The artist deconstructs the notion of happiness, which is presented as a pure appearance, like a universal mask designed to conceal suffering.