Cédric Rivrain
System
22 May — 30 June 2026
Écorché (Bonny), 2026
Oil painting on linen, medical stretcher
208 x 54 cm (82 x 21 1/2 in)
Écorché (Rodrigue), 2026
Oil painting on linen, medical stretcher
208 x 54 cm (82 x 21 1/2 in)
Half Jaw Self Portrait (Autoportrait à la demi- mâchoire), 2026
Pencil, colored Pencil and make-up powder on recycled paper
36,7 x 27,8 cm (14 3/8 x 10 7/8 in)
Once you have seen inside the body like that… seen the poor
frail bravery of the living animal, naked, helpless and
exposed… once you have been inside the body like that, and
felt your strength ebbing, and seen the flesh melting, and
known how easy it is to die… once you have known your own
violence, and stopped yourself just inches from crushing,
seen the writhing pleasure of the thing before it
self-destructs, and known how easy it is to kill… you know
there is no safe place inside the body… cozy and well packed
in the happy flesh as you think. Those who choose to look at
this do not return from hell unscathed.1
There is a man and a woman, their bodies whole and untouched, without blood or wounds, lying upon stretchers. They are naked, pulling back the skin of their chests, offering their hearts. They do not appear to suffer; their gazes are lucid, the expressions upon their faces serene, peaceful. The two paintings depict Rodrigue Fondeviolle and Bonny Poon, respectively the artist’s lover and the artist’s gallerist, extending Rivrain’s enduring inclination to have those close to him — friends, lovers, and a few immortal strangers — pose within the apparatus of his life. The two canvases are affixed directly onto stretchers whose orange hue echoes that of the painted surface itself, and upon which the two bodies lie motionless. They look back at us. Their hearts continue to beat. They are still alive.
Cédric Rivrain is an artist of the interstice, sensitive to those few seconds — perhaps even to the singular second — between beings, and opening onto the immortal. In System, the artist’s first exhibition in Canada, Rivrain situates himself within a doubly biographical logic, rooted in a childhood memory first structured by two regimes of images: on the one hand, the anatomical plates of his father, a doctor, disposed throughout his childhood home; on the other, the devotional images arranged by his mother, a devoted Catholic. From this coexistence emerges a dual knowledge of the body, at once scientific and symbolic, and of what lies beneath. Within this resides a tenderness toward the concealed, the masked — prohibition, limit, and taboo.
Rivrain’s works have always attended to these figures of otherness; women and men seen from outside windows, portholes, and mirrors, suspended between two spaces — that of the intimate and the communal, and thus, respectively, of secrecy and ostentation ; often accompanied by animals — horses, bats, cats, and monkeys —, doubles of the beings themselves, staging the hidden within the other and the play of malice ; and the constant presence of the artist, appearing in various self-portraits, at times himself, at times another: Rivrain–De Bascher in a leather mask, or as a small pink beaded kitty. Rivrain contemplates the reflection of the self, isolated within the silence of the crowd.
The artist’s self-portrait forms the third element of System, adding his own presence to the trio constituted alongside Fondeviolle and Poon, and placing himself at the very center of the scene of the accident. There, with the clinical gesture of his right hand, he pulls back his skin, drawing it far enough to expose the interior of his body: the skeletal structure of his jaw and the furrows of flesh surrounding it. He does not bleed, and seems to divest himself of his skin without pain. Here, the confrontation with the living networks beneath the skin echoes the first encounter with the medical illustration plates of his father, and which gave Rivrain a consciousness of the unapparent. The canvases, mounted directly onto emergency stretchers, insist on an anatomical reading of painting itself: the pictorial surface as a taut skin, susceptible, in turn, of being opened, ripped. This mutilation, as as any reflection of reality throughout Rivrain’s œuvre, unfolds in complete silence, and with a kind of gentleness.
Rivrain is an artist who reflects upon the limits of pleasure within the circumstances of love. He too will have wondered how far he could go, and what he might see there. Here, we undergo the limit-experience of the body and of play with death; we follow things through to their furthest point, taste radical bliss, and live within the sublime cover of whisper and oblivion. We wish for it to last forever and perhaps secretly hope still to perish within it; that it might carry us away, in one decisive stroke, so that we might end there softly.
— Hugo Bausch Belbachir
1 Terence Sellers, Is There Life After Sadomasochism?, 1991.