Reynaldo Rivera joins Now Instant to present the Los Angeles premiere of his debut feature, Fistful of Love, followed by a conversation with novelist Justin Torres.

The 6pm ticketed presentation and post-screening conversation will be followed by a free public reception and book signing celebrating the launch of Propiedad Privada, Rivera's latest photo book, published by Semiotext(e), starting at 8pm.

Shot largely over 1996 and 1997, Fistful of Love is the debut feature of the Mexico-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Reynaldo Rivera, and makes extensive use of his immense personal archive of Hi8 tapes. Vignettes from Rivera’s life in both Mexico and California—including raucous parties, punk clubs, drag performances, political protests, intimate moments with artist friends, family, and more—are elegantly edited together in a nonlinear fashion by filmmaker Pablo Bujosa Rodríguez, to present a nostalgia-free look back at the late ’90s, and the characters, music, and cities that make up a life.

Propiedad Privada 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. Propiedad Privada is the artist’s second monograph, following the widely praised Reynaldo Rivera: Notes for a Disappeared City (2020). Whereas Notes was an ode to Los Angeles, documenting a furtive subculture of house parties and gay clubs, Propiedad Privada 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, Propiedad Privada 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, as a young photographer, to defy taboos surrounding nudity and queer sexuality, Propiedad Privada encapsulates almost four decades of work. Complementing this quietly monumental archive is a curated assortment of texts, including an introduction by Lauren Mackler; a set of specially commissioned “blue” writings by authors Constance Debré, Devan Diaz, Raquel Gutierrez, Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus, Brontez Purnell, Reynaldo Rivera, Abdellah Taïa, Colm Tóibín, and Justin Torres; and a selection from poet Gil Cuadros’s canonical collection City of God.

Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. He lives Los Angeles, and is a professor of English at UCLA.

Reynaldo Rivera is an artist from Mexicali, Mexico, who now lives in Los Angeles, where he documents the ongoing relationship between the city and its people.

Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.