In her review of Love, a 1988 painting by Juan Domingo Dávila, Nelly Richard refers to ideas she had previously explored in La cita amorosa, jointly published with the artist a few years earlier. Harking back to that publication allows the author to reincorporate Dávila’s work in excerpts and quotes, which makes it possible to understand the fictions that flow from his work and inform his painting. The artist’s explicit engagement with a homoerotic imaginary is central to Richard’s reading of Love, since this work insists on the explorations and proposals developed by Dávila over the course of time.  When she wrote about the work in 1988, Richard identified referents the artist used to assemble his painting, thus generating the cross readings that inform its meaning.     

The text Love o la cita infectada (1988) was published in El fulgor de lo obsceno, about the painter Juan Domingo Dávila (b. 1946). The book, which was edited by Francisco Zegers, includes contributions from the essayist Carlos Pérez Villalobos (b. 1958) and the Peruvian art critic Gustavo Buntix (b. 1957). There are also, in the final section, details and works that Dávila painted in 1987 and 1988.

Unlike a great many texts from the period, which are mainly interested in the artist’s body of work as a whole, Richard’s review focuses entirely on one painting and includes a black-and-white reproduction of the image in question. This was unusual, since images were not commonly included.

Despite the fact that Dávila moved to Australia in 1974 after the Chilean coup d’état, Richard developed an interest in his work that found expression in several texts and publications. La cita amorosa, also edited by Zegers, is one of the best known of these because it includes a number of helpful tips for understanding Dávila’s painting. In her review, Richard interweaves Dávila’s biography with strategies he used in his painting. [For more about Richard’s connection with Dávila in the 1990s, see the ICAA Digital Archive: “El caso ‘Simón Bolívar’: o el arte como zona de disturbios” (doc. no. 756001)].