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Love in Brooklyn, painted in baby blue, light pink, and pale green, depicts a stark image of Brooklyn, which had not yet seen the development spreading across Manhattan: “Love in Brooklyn / Rape / Sodomy / Murder.” Hyperbole or not, Rene’s words bear witness to the chaotic, sometimes violent nature of the city and even his own life.
Love in Brooklyn 1990
mixed media on paper
40 x 26 in / 102 x 66 cm
Signed and dated ’Rene Ricard 1990’
white wood frame
Exhibition history: Mal de Fin, 1990, Petersburg Gallery, New York.
As an author, Ricard’s increasing use of text in his work over the 1980’s reflects his interest in the written word. His confessional hand-painted and hand-written poetry is almost always accompanied by the artist’s signature, often integrated into the composition, or placed at its center, displaying his self-assured confidence.
This confidence (and Ricard’s bedroom-eyed allure) attracted the attention of Andy Warhol, and the young Rene (formerly Albert Napoleon Ricard) became his protege. He would appear in three Warhol films, even playing the Factory founder himself in “Andy Warhol Story”. Warhol would later call the famously acid-tongued Ricard “The George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world”, and close friend William Rand called the artist “the Baudelaire of Avenue C…a brilliant, elusive and glamorous underground figure.”
By the early 1980s, Rene Ricard was a fixture in the New York art scene, not only as an accomplished artist, but as a critic. Penning enlightening and poetic essays for Artforum, he turned his attention to rising stars such as Julian Schnabel and Alex Katz. Ricard famously wrote the first major article on Jean-Michel Basquiat. “The Radiant Child” is credited with launching Basquiat’s career, and is considered a seminal contemporary art essay.
