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“one shoe/one you/True love”, reads the artist’s poetry, written in looping, silver script, beneath the heel of Cinderella’s slipper. Ricard focuses on adornment: a diamond ring, earrings, choker necklaces, and the object of desire: the glass slipper in its seductive transparency. He dedicated One Shoe One You to Warhol, writing in cursive in the lower right with lime green paint: “For Andy Warhol”. Ricard’s dainty glass slipper sketch mimics Warhol’s shoe drawings (both artists feature the shoe without its pair, elevating it to iconography.
A clock sketched in metallic paint is annotated “dim night”, midnight reversed, or perhaps Rene’s clever summary of an evening’s disappointment. This doubling or reversal of formal elements is characteristic of Ricard who was first and foremost a poet skilled at wordplay. The Cinderella figure on the left is painted in translucent dark grey, and on the right, in a brushy olive green. Perhaps this is a play on “one you” and the illusion of singularity—or perhaps one of the figures is a shadow of the other, suggesting duality of the self, a quality that Ricard surely embodied with his moody travels between high company and low places.
One Shoe One You / True Love Aug 29 1989 Oil on canvas 32 x 47 inches / 81 x 199.5 cm
Signed Rene Ricard for Andy Warhol
