Artist Reynaldo Rivera's second monograph, collecting almost four decades of his intimate and illicit "blue" works. Fistful of Love showcases over one hundred photographs from Reynaldo Rivera's personal archive, introducing never-before-seen images alongside some of the artist's most iconic works. Shot from the 1980s to the present, the candid photographs in this raw, erotic series capture moments of privacy and pleasure. The series features the recurring figures of the artist's lovers, friends, and sisters, pictured in their most undressed states, and movingly portrays relationships that have since ended--loves later lost, glimpsed before their undoing. Closer to the present, the series also includes writers and artists who have more recently entered Rivera's life and agreed to pose seductively, performatively for his camera.
Fistful of Love is the artist's second monograph, following the widely praised
Reynaldo Rivera: Notes for a Disappeared Cit (2020). Whereas
Notes was an ode to Los Angeles, documenting a furtive subculture of house parties and gay clubs,
Fistful is far more interior, capturing "performances" made for an audience of one.
Rivera calls these photographs his "blue" works. There is a sultry moodiness to the series, as well as a fondness for the "indecent" and illicit, for moments that were not staged and not meant to be seen. In an era when self-documenting has become commonplace and candid photography is unhesitatingly shared with strangers, this body of work reaches for intimacy, privacy, self-use. It also upends the predominant representation of gay Latino male sexuality as macho and hardcore. Rivera's subjects, many of them photographed at the height of the AIDS epidemic, are presented neither as predator nor prey, but in more human terms of love, lust, longing, and self-fulfillment. A tender portrait of the artist and his community,
Fistful of Love is both elegiac and documentary. Some of Rivera's subjects have since died, yet are preserved here in peak vitality, fixed in moments of pleasure. Others have become lifelong muses, letting Rivera's lens be witness to their bodies' aging over the years. Many of the photographs depict Rivera himself, his image reappearing throughout the series in mirrors and self-portraits, another body subject to the transformations of time.
Emerging from Rivera's desire to defy taboos surrounding nudity and queer sexuality,
Fistful of Love encapsulates almost four decades of work. Complementing this quietly monumental archive is a curated assortment of texts: a catalog essay by Lauren Mackler; a set of specially commissioned "blue" writings by authors such as Constance Debré, Abdellah Taïa, and Colm Tóibín; and a selection from poet Gil Cuadros's canonical collection
City of God.
藝術家雷納爾多·里維拉（Reynaldo Rivera）的第二本專著，收錄了他近四十年來親密而非法的「藍色」作品。
《愛的拳頭》展示了來自雷納爾多·里維拉個人檔案中的一百多幅照片，介紹了從未公開過的影像以及一些藝術家最具代表性的作品。這些照片拍攝於1980年代至今，這組原始而性感的系列捕捉了私密與愉悅的瞬間。系列中反覆出現的角色包括藝術家的情人、朋友和姐妹，展現了他們最裸露的狀態，感人地描繪了那些已經結束的關係——曾經失去的愛情，在崩潰之前的瞬間閃現。更接近當下，這系列還包括最近進入里維拉生活的作家和藝術家，他們同意為他的相機以誘惑的姿態進行表演。《愛的拳頭》是藝術家的第二本專著，繼廣受好評的《雷納爾多·里維拉：消失城市的筆記》（2020）之後。與《筆記》這本讚美洛杉磯的作品，記錄了一個隱秘的家庭派對和同性戀俱樂部的亞文化相比，《愛的拳頭》則更具內省性，捕捉了為單一觀眾而進行的「表演」。
里維拉稱這些照片為他的「藍色」作品。這系列作品散發著性感的陰鬱氣氛，對「不雅」和非法的事物有著特殊的喜愛，捕捉那些未經安排且不應被看見的瞬間。在自我紀錄已成為常態、坦率攝影毫不猶豫地與陌生人分享的時代，這組作品追求親密、私密和自我使用。它也顛覆了對拉丁裔同性戀男性性慾的主流表現，將其描繪為陽剛和硬核。里維拉的主題，許多人在艾滋病疫情高峰期被拍攝，並非以掠食者或獵物的身份呈現，而是以更人性化的愛、慾望、渴望和自我實現的角度。作為藝術家及其社群的溫柔肖像，《愛的拳頭》同時具有悼念和紀錄的特質。里維拉的一些主題已經去世，但在這裡仍以巔峰的活力被保存，定格在愉悅的瞬間。其他人則成為終身的靈感來源，讓里維拉的鏡頭見證他們隨著歲月流逝的身體。許多照片描繪了里維拉本人，他的形象在整個系列中反覆出現於鏡子和自畫像中，成為另一個隨著時間變化的身體。
《愛的拳頭》源於里維拉對於挑戰圍繞裸體和酷兒性慾的禁忌的渴望，濃縮了近四十年的創作。這個靜謐而重要的檔案還附有精心策劃的文本：由勞倫·麥克勒（Lauren Mackler）撰寫的目錄文章；由康斯坦斯·德布雷（Constance Debré）、阿卜杜拉·塔伊亞（Abdellah Taïa）和科爾姆·托賓（Colm Tóibín）等作者特別委託的「藍色」作品；以及詩人吉爾·夸德羅斯（Gil Cuadros）經典作品《上帝之城》中的選段。
Reynaldo Rivera lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by MoMa PS1 (2024) and Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2023, 2021). He has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta (2023); and the Princeton University Art Museum (2022). His work featured in Made in L.A. 2020: a version at the Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Los Angeles. His first monograph, Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.
