Crack a smile
Cédric Revrain 
Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris

What am I thinking about? I wonder — or do I wander? At this point, I’m not sure anymore. This is a new city, and I can’t tell whether I’ve changed completely or if only certain parts of me have shifted. I don’t have all the answers. No one does. I’ve started writing down my dreams — for research purposes, I tell myself. Sometimes I question if I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. But then again, who decides that? Regardless, I’m doing something. And some days, I even like it.

Cédric Revrain’s exhibition CRACK A SMILE unfolds like a diary of those moments — the uncertain, the voyeuristic, the oddly tender. Installed within the industrial intimacy of the Grand Garage Haussmann, a 6 floors deactivated garage on the 8th arrondissement of Paris, now home for exhibitions, events, music video shootings. As I wander through the space, I’m met with Revrain’s paintings, to me they signify portals into suspended encounters: fragments of life observed, imagined, desired. Each work feels like a still from a private film — oil on canvas instead of celluloid — where the line between memory and fiction is blurred.

There’s a voyeurism here, but it isn’t invasive. It’s soft, curious, almost complicit. Revrain paints scenes we half-recognize: a nude glimpsed through a window, a flash from a stranger’s phone, a lone animal crossing a surreal interior. The figures are often caught mid-thought, mid-pose — dreamlike and melancholy, yet grounded in the textures of the everyday. They echo the ephemeral way we encounter others: on the street, online, in dreams. Are these real people? Did these scenes happen? Or are they the afterimages of something felt more than lived?

Queerness pulses quietly through these works — not only in the bodies depicted, but in the gaze itself. There’s an unapologetic sensuality in Revrain’s brush, a desire to capture fleeting intimacies without resolving them. His scenes don't demand explanation; they ask to be felt, intuitively. The bodies, often tender and exposed, are not presented for consumption but for communion. Queerness here is not just in subject but in structure — a refusal of linear narrative, a leaning toward dream logic, toward ambiguity, toward presence without definition.

The animals — swans, cats, a baby monkey, horses, domestic companions — wander in and out like totems or silent witnesses. Sometimes they comfort, sometimes they unsettle. It’s not everyday that you see a swan with a hoover. Their presence bends the logic of the room; they offer no clear symbolism, and yet they belong. Much like the queerness in these works, they displace the expected and leave space for interpretation, intimacy, and the surreal.

Revrain’s use of oil on linen and canvas emphasizes the permanence of what is otherwise transient. These are not mere reproductions of photographs or memories, but poetic reinventions — scenes made iconic through brush and pigment. There’s something radical in choosing to render the ephemeral with such care, especially when the subject is a fleeting glance, a moment of solitude, a half-remembered dream.

In the end, CRACK A SMILE doesn’t ask us to decode or define. It invites us to linger — to drift between moments, to embrace the eroticism of not knowing, to find beauty in the unresolved. Whether real or imagined, lived or longed for, these scenes remind us of how queerness reshapes the ordinary into something luminous, vulnerable, and alive.

To wander is also to wonder — and Revrain’s work is an open invitation to do both.