Dream Girls

October 18th, 2009

DRAWING MODELS, CEDRIC RIVRAIN MIXES HIS PAST, PRESENT, AND FANTASY
Words Momoko Price Art Cédric Rivrain

World-famous models pose for Cédric Rivrain. But sometimes real women – even tremor-inducing, drop-dead babes – just don’t cut it. So Rivrain makes them up.

“It’s great when you draw Sasha Pivovarova, or Natasha Poly, or Kate Moss,” he says casually. “I mean, they are not big models for nothing. They really have something special, and they’re great girls. But when you want to say something more personal, it’s better to just invent some person. You can be more of yourself.” He stops: “But I don’t mean that they look like me!” he laughs, checking his English.

They don’t. Most of Rivrain’s muses look like stunning, utterly unapproachable models, even the ones that don’t actually exist. They stare you down like the common man you are, their spectacular cheekbones held high. But Rivrain’s art isn’t about elevating the unattainable. It’s really more about close friends. It’s just that many of Rivrain’s friends happen to be unattainably beautiful models, as well as members of the avant-garde fashion elite.

“All the art drawings I did at the exhibition I had two months ago were about persons that I know,” Rivrain explains, recalling his last show at the Brachfeld Gallery in Paris. “Because the better you know the person, the better it is for the drawing. I never draw someone who asks me to draw for them. No, actually. Unless I know the person well.”

This exhibition was Rivrain’s most personal, in which he showed delicate etchings of close colleagues and friends, including designers Yazbukey, Gabrielle Greiss, and Lucas Ossendrijver. Bandages were spread across their noses, cheeks, or breasts – ironic accessories on such flawless figures.

It was Rivrain’s friends in fashion who discovered him, gave him an audience and got him noticed more than a decade ago when he worked as an intern under publicist Kuki de Salvertes. So he returned the favour and put them on display – and with the bandages, he made sure to keep them safe.

“All the portraits are of my friends and the idea of the bandages, it’s to protect them, of course, to protect my friends, to make them beautiful and protect them as well,” he says.

“They’re like a special garment that you wear. I know it sounds weird, and I don’t go to parties like this, but I love the idea of the protection and something healing but something beautiful at the same time. They’re really like ornaments.”

Those medical ornaments are also a whimsical tribute to Rivrain’s late father, a doctor who surrounded Rivrain with 17th-century anatomical drawings when he was a boy, thus igniting his son’s love of portraiture at an early age. Given his father’s keen interest in anatomy and his Chanel-sporting mother’s adoration of fashion, Rivrain’s entire career actually seems like a kind of homage to his parents. Looking back, he says, he knew exactly where he was headed. “I was sure I would live [off drawing],” he says. “There was no question [of living off] something else.”

Artistically, drawing was his first word. “Now I’m slowly making the sentence more and more clear.” He doesn’t see himself diving into anything radically different in the future, but he is slowly letting his theme evolve. For Rivrain, Kate Moss was easy street. Only recently has he overcome his timid nature enough to draw nude men. Not real men, of course.

“There is only one naked man in the exhibition [at the Brachfeld Gallery], and he doesn’t exist,” he laughs. “I was too shy to ask a guy to pose naked, and I didn’t want to make one of my boyfriends that I had – not several at the same time, of course I only had one boyfriend at a time – but I thought it would be funnier to make it a fantasy man: ‘If he’s naked, let’s make him a fantasy!’ And it’s a red-haired guy. And it’s funny because my new boyfriend now is a red-haired guy. But I didn’t have him at the time! I created him and he appeared!”

Rivrain jokes affectionately, but it is really so incredible that he would pull his next lover out of his dreams? After all, he did the same with his career, didn’t he?

http://www.cedricrivrain.com/