Cédric Rivrain at Fitzpatrick Gallery

Artist: Cédric Rivrain

Exhibition title: Belle Main

Venue: Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, France

Date: November 26, 2021 – January 22, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris

Fitzpatrick Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Cédric Rivrain, “Belle Main” — the artist’s most substantial solo presentation to date — which features a body of new paintings exhibited for the first time.

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Inveterate demimondaines, nocturnal Rabelaisians, human readymades, castafiores on poppers, defrocked dandies and m&m’s twinks are among Cédric Rivrain’s imaginary museum. Similar to André Malraux’s coming out at Castle Faggot, a decadent Luna Park dreamed up by Derek McCormack in which Charles Baudéclair and Stéphane Marshmallarmé cross paths, this exhibition is a descent into a delirious cabaret. Tonight it features Manet la Délurée, Chardin la Catin, Fragonard le Queutard and Rembrandt la Tante.

In Rivrain’s National Portrait Gallery, one sees Lili Reynaud-Dewar who seems to have indulged the inextinguishable thirst that animated Béatrice Dalle in Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day shoot in 2001. Together with Emily Sundblad and Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), they hold a posture that quietly subverts the genealogy of 19th-century odalisque paintings whose convention was to display a female body as an erotic ornament. Their gazes have the ballistic precision of the desert eagle held by Nadine in Fuck Me: the rape and revenge odyssey realized by Virginie Despentes in 2000. Through this triad of portraits, Cédric Rivrain holds at gunpoint a phallic history of representation that reified women as sexual sculptures.

A fourth erotic alteration can be identified in Oscar Tuazon’s portrayal as the dandy in The Luncheon on the Grass painted by Edouard Manet in 1863. In this ultimate bootleg, all the protagonists have left the picture leaving just Oscar, the Angelino pope of survivalist modernism, wearing only his tattoos in the guise of a costume. In turn, Jacques de Bascher, the lover of Karl Lagerfeld, who built his life on a tragic pyramid of decadent heroes from Ludwig II of Bavaria to Jacques Adelsward Fersen, is seen as the Pink Panther, dressed as a BDSM Pope or at fleur-de-lys level in his shower. If the latter was known for his hedonist virtuosity, especially when it came to conceiving concupiscent evenings such as the Black Moratorium held in honor of Lagerfeld in 1977, Juliana Huxtable is not to be forgotten. Artist, DJ, and creator of the cult queer New York party “Shock Value”, Huxtable is portrayed as a da Vinci Spring-Summer 2022 muse deplugged from a Wachowski sisters’ cyberpunk fantasy. From sci-fi to the ethereal gaze of Rodrigue Fondeviolle… a stone’s throw away. Standing on the edge of a Basque cliff with a rose in his hand, his eyes contain the ineffable character of grief animating Chantal Ackerman’s tragic fable The Captive. Finally, Rivrain’s self-portrait, whose commentary could be reduced to the minerality of his blue eyes that seem to reconcile the brutality of a diamond with the delicacy of a spit.

Genre scenes are also honored. The first one depicts à la Jacques Emile Blanche, the Parisian sacrosanct ritual of the aperitif where everyone can lean over to hear the sweet song of gossip and juicy confessions from a nearby terrace, while the second captures an afterparty and its pantomime theater. Lastly, this museum would not be complete without its share of pastoral and still-life paintings. At equidistance between a surrealist rebus and 17th-century Flemish bestiary, these works will let lustful minds see erotic allegories while the others will muse on the meaning of the Samsung Galaxy recurrence.

This exhibition can also be understood as Cédric Rivrain’s own pantheon celebrating his friends and lover. Like the Temple of Friendship created by Natalie Clifford Barney in the early 20th century at the back of a Saint-Germain-des-Prés courtyard which celebrated queer friendship with a touch of jet-set fin-de-siècle, Rivrain has throughout the years edified a Notre-Dame of the Faggots, Eccentrics and Marginals. Amen!

— Pierre-Alexandre Mateos & Charles Teyssou

Cédric Rivrain (b. 1977, Limoges) is a french artist who lives and works in Paris. He began drawing at the age of 18, and started his career working as an illustrator for publications such as Dazed & Confused, Vogue, etc., and in fashion studios as a designer and illustrator, notably for Martine Sitbon, Hermès and John Galliano for Dior. He developed his meticulously refined hand, which became his signature style.

Selected solo exhibitions include Portraits, Shanaynay, Paris (2018); Transvas, Balice Hertling, Paris (2015); Drawings, Edward Brachfeld, Paris (2009).

Recent group exhibitions include Still Time, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2021); Five Gay Men and a Parking Ticket, Medium P, Frankfurt (2021); Jacques de Bascher, An Exhibition, Treize, Paris (2020); Love My Way, Villa Romaine, Villa Noailles (2019); The Young is Night, Bonny Poon, Marseille (2019); Canard au Sans, Sans Titre (2016), et. al.

Cédric Rivrain, Belle Main, 2021, exhibition view, Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris

Cédric Rivrain, Boîte a bijoux, 2021, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, 23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in

Cédric Rivrain, Jade (Puppies Puppies), 2021, Oil on canvas, 90 x 160 cm, 35 3/8 x 63 in

Cédric Rivrain, Ficus et Masque, 2021, Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm, 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 in

Cédric Rivrain, Canapé, 2021, Oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm, 51 1/8 x 76 3/4 in

Cédric Rivrain, Juliana, 2019 – 2021, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, 23 31/50 x 19 69/100 in

Cédric Rivrain, Fleur de Lys (Les Fesses de Jacques de Bascher), 2020-2021, Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

Cédric Rivrain, Masque (Jacques de Bascher), 2020-2021, Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

Cédric Rivrain, Panthère Rose (Jacques de Bascher), 2020-2021, Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

Cédric Rivrain, Ballon, 2019-2021, Oil on canvas, 73 x 116 cm, 28 37/50 x 45 67/100 in

Cédric Rivrain, Oscar au bain, 2020-2021, Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm, 63 39/50 x 51 9/50 in

Cédric Rivrain, Cygne, 2019 – 2021, Oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, 28 37/50 x 23 31/50 in

Cédric Rivrain, Bouche ouverte (Autoportrait), 2021, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 cm, 14 17/100 x 11 81/100 in

Cédric Rivrain, Rodrigue à Biarritz, 2019 – 2021, Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, 31 89/100 x 25 59/100 in

Cédric Rivrain, Canard, 2021, Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm., 57 1/2 x 44 7/8 in.

Cédric Rivrain, Bar, 2021, Oil on canvas, 90 x 130 cm, 35 43/100 x 51 9/50 in

Cédric Rivrain, Emily au Ritz, 2019-2021, Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 31 7/8 x 39 3/8 in

Cédric Rivrain, Lili rue Molière, 2019-2021, Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm, 31 89/100 x 39 37/100 in