Fistful of Love

About Fistful of Love

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.