ENVERGURE

Hard to believe but at one time Currado Malaspina was known simply as un homme de beaucoup mérite. His first foray into the international art scene was the 1979 Belarus Biennial where he shared the small French pavillion with six other artists. The show was an incoherent mishmash of parched academic miscellany and fortunately, lacking the prestige of other planetary art fairs, the event was scarcely noticed beyond the borders of Minsk.

He was happy at the time to be included in any exhibition and he showed the commensurate gratitude and grace. He impressed his peers by his humility and his professional generosity.

To pinpoint the exact date when Currado Malaspina became the petulant, egomaniacal narcissist bent on advancing his career while destabilizing the reputations of his colleagues is hard to do with any degree of certainty. Some contend that it was about the time he published the Pointed Plunder Manifesto. Others insist it was shortly after the tragic death of his second wife Celeste.

One thing all agree on is that this flawed genius has drifted light years away from that homme de beaucoup mérite. But allow me to indulge in a brief hallucination as I post above one of the drawings Currado exhibited in Minsk. This lovely piece is inscribed to me on the back and has been in my collection for nearly 30 years.

THE WORLD IS A MIRROR OF MYSELF DYING

In the late 1970’s Currado Malaspina initiated an unlikely friendship with Henry Miller that lasted until the great writer’s death. Miller showed the young Malaspina great tenderness and took a keen interest in his work. A few of his early monotypes remain in the Miller estate and are only made available to researchers and scholars.

A few weeks ago Currado shared a few reminiscences with me while we had a wonderful lunch of rein et foie de veau at Bateau Calife on Quai Malaquais:

“’The whores of Montmartre were as cute as buttonholes’, Miller would exhale when the ravishing mists of memory would claw him away from his middle-class present. Seized by an irresistible urge to prevaricate, Miller’s eloquence was most gripping the more ignoble the myth. In a voice as raspy as a tailpipe he would rattle off names like Durrell and Cendrars and recount with excruciating detail episodes of inspired dissipation. To Henri, life was a book and the only pretext to living was to find something to write about.”

I’m not so sure I trust Currado’s account.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF CURRADO MALASPINA

"Desire," Currado wrote to me in a letter dated March 21st, 1993, "is both blind and brief and I'd best vanquish this impulse early and decisively."

The graceful dignity in Currado Malaspina's youthful correspondences shows a young man struggling with a tempestuous spirit. Calming what were then unutterable impulses took a heroic and ultimately hopeless discipline of self-denial. He taught himself a soft, perfect pitch in which to frame the daily crucible of his deferred raptures.


Malaspina continues to be a devoted epistolarian and his collected letters are soon to be published by Caillot Press. Clotted with vivid imagery, artful prose and philosophical insight, rarely has such a painful document of moral frailty been such a pleasure to read. Lustily illuminated with casual pen and ink jottings, this new volume will add much to the already rich catalog of Malaspina's oeuvre.

Lautréamont

Foundation Domy Morgane, The Zurich based organization founded by the Swiss collector Pierre Hertzberg, has recently announced the publication of Lautréamont, a folio of prints by my dear friend Currado Malaspina. Dizzying in its range, the works are subtle reflections on the encyclopedic reservoir of erotic French literature.

In the United States, Malaspina has seen armaments of prudential cultural gatekeepers raining blows upon his reputation. In the eyes of one American academic, Malaspina is "... a sinking barge of ossified European libertinism." This new publication is being viewed in France as a gallant slap at the shrieking mice of political correctness.

I salute you Monsieur Hertzberg!

עבודה קיץ

Micah Carpentier, 1968

To tour the Louvre with Currado Malaspina is to be subjected to an erratic and idiosyncratic reading of art history that can be in turn both illuminating and annoying.

Take for example his description of Cimabue’s “Maestà”


“The first credible depiction of Hebraic pain from the world’s most famous yiddishe mama”.

Or Poussin’s “Saint Frances of Rome Announcing the End of the Plague in Rome”


“Cirque de Soleil on 17th century quaaludes”

This summer, Malaspina was given by the Louvre the distinct honor of curating an exhibition that to my mind was long overdue. Micah Carpentier: Les Autoportraits explores an under-appreciated aspect of the Cuban master’s capacious oeuvre. Including painting, drawing, film, photography and printmaking, the show delves deeply into the epic narcissism of this deeply flawed genius. The work is stunning in its scope and in its subtlety. Never has shameless self-aggrandizement seemed so lyrical.

The catalog is equal to the task as well. Written and designed by Malaspina, his pithy annotations are true to the characters of both the author and the subject. The caption under the photo reproduced above reads:

“The famously tone-deaf Carpentier photographed as a norteño balladeer in a straw (Le Bon Marché) cowgirl hat”

LE VIOLON D'INGRES

Like Hans Hoffmann, whom he knew quite well, Currado Malaspina likes to work in the studio naked. Unencumbered by cloth, ungartered of the smocks and aprons and all the other protective garments of the trade, Currado functions best within the lightness of his flesh. In fact, all who dare visit him at his capacious rue Gassendi studio must equally repair to the sheerness of skin.

Such was the occasion for the now famous mural-sized painting, Dix-sept which proudly hangs in the Elysée Palace’s Salle de Clairvoyance in the northeast Coeur de Tremblement wing. Composed of 17 separate panels, the painting depicts the unmistakable Malaspina in various postures of vitality and repose interspersed within a rascal’s gallery of several unidentified women.

At a recent reception for the foreign minister of Israel, Delphine Frizot, sous-préfet of the famously verdant Mésange-sur-Seine was overheard sneering “il semble que la pornographie est le nouveau passe-temps de l'état.”

THE ATELIER

"The hideous work of painting offers grace to those who greet its drudgery, not with groans but with gratitude." Thus wrote Gayland Fix in his preface to the catalogue raisonné of Currado Malaspina's work, "Malaspina: The Complete Oils" (Gallimard 2002).

To pay a visit to Currado Malaspina's Rue Gassendi studio is to perform a haj to a time-hallowed glade of unguarded passion. Jealously unkempt, the space is an unseemly spring of anarchy. It swells with the stuff of art in an ungainly stillness that haunts even days after one's departure.

Yet it is here where Adona's Motto, was painted and here where The Milky Garment series was nursed to perfection. For thirty years Malaspina toiled on such masterworks as Rightous Guild, Lightly Come The Babes, Don Juan Of Jerusalem, and Une Belle Une Moche. It was here where he and Lita Abruzzi foiled the arc of reason with their savage and accursed love affair.

I am now in Paris, visiting with my good friend Malaspina and we are sharing our painterly thoughts on the significance of flesh, the shape time and the rudded soil of the South.

SATORI IN PARIS

For years Currado Malaspina imagined to himself how he might die. He preferred the prospect of dying peacefully in his sleep but was certain that it would not be the case. Skin hemorrhages and progressive liver failure were much more in keeping with his personality.

His fears mingled so seamlessly with his obsessions that it was hard for him to discern with any clarity which of his fantasies were grounded in rationality and which were symptoms of a neurosis.

At the time it seemed to him that the only possible solution was to become a Buddhist. He had no real understanding of Buddhism, but sensed an equanimity would follow the assertion of faith.

MIDNIGHT'S PROMISE

Portrait of Currado Malaspina, 2009
Drawn by Dahlia Danton

“I was inflamed by him.”

It’s well known that the great love of Currado Malaspina’s life was Dahlia Danton. He would not be spared from the anxious agonies of his longings. To call her a cruel mistress would be to miss the point completely. Malaspina was complicit in the immaculate imperfection of their union.

She visited him at his new atelier on rue Gassendi, a small, intimate space that looks out on the Bibliotheque Georges Brassens. It was their first meeting in 15 years.

“I was inflamed by him,” is what Danton said to me when I asked her why she would subject Currado to such a savage reunion.

“And how did he look?” I asked

COBI ATOYAT

Currado Malaspina’s flimsy grasp on reality was evidenced again in an interview published in the spring edition of La Nouvelle Cosmopolis. He was interviewed by Loquecia McCart, the venerable independent curator known mostly for the succès de scandale surrounding the exhibition “J'ai Touché sa Chatte.” Asked to name his three favorite contemporary artists, he predictably rattled off Micah Carpentier and Dahlia Danton. What shocked McCart was the third artist he named.

“I had the privilege several years ago,” began Malaspina, slowly drawing out his story for maximum suspense, “to spend a week in Smyrna, lecturing at the Beylik Institute to a group of very gifted graduate students. It was my habit to begin each day by walking the three kilometers from my hotel to Konak Pier to a café improbably called Maimonides. Eddie, the proprietor, a portly man with a waxed handlebar moustache, always made it a point to personally serve me his freshly baked börek, pour me his dangerously scalding coffee and sit with me at a table with the most favorable view of the Port of Izmir.

“'In the Karatas,' Eddie said one morning referring to the old Jewish quarter in the city center, 'just off of Dario Moreno Street, there is a small spice shop where I purchase my za’atar and cardamom. Its owner, Yaris Atoyat, a most peculiar man, may be of special interest to you.' Eddie knew I was an artist, but that was all he knew of me, so I assumed it wasn’t the spices he had in mind.

“The following day, after my lecture, I took a cab to Arugete and Sons Spices to see for myself what Eddie was talking about. On the walls of the shop, whose cacophonic pungency wafted into the street in thick, invisible hallucinogenic waves, were literally hundreds of oddly rendered watercolors of nudes. They were the strangest, most disturbing images I had ever seen. They seemed both ignorant of and aloof from any western tradition. I had experienced nothing like this before or since.

“I introduced myself to Mr. Atoyat and asked who the artist was who was responsible for all the beautiful paintings. He beamed when he said ‘my son, my son Cobi Atoyat is the artist'.

“And so to answer your question, my three favorite artists are: Carpentier, Danton and Cobi Atoyat.”

Cobi Atoyat 2009

M E R D R E

When the documentary filmmaker Michel Fédérovitch approached Currado Malaspina with a proposal to collaborate on his interminably deferred Jarry project, Currado jumped at the chance. It had little to do with any affinity with the noted progenitor of pataphysics, nor with any absurd interest in the world of the theatre but rather as a means to avoid confronting a chronic creative block that had turned his Rue Cournot studio into a barren patch of abandoned, half finished, ill-conceived attempts at restoring his unearned reputation.

For the sake of cruel but just brevity let me just state that Currado Malaspina is a wretched embittered has-been whose best work is way behind him. Whether it be Alfred E. Newman or Alfred Jarry, it matters little to a man whose creative intellect is a parched mesa of insignificant confections.

Enter Fédérovitch, flush with the financial backing of the pecunious software developers from Sophia Antipolis, Conjurés & Soldats and Malaspina is off his ass and drawing.

If my tone is bitter it is merely a reflection of an acutely focused resentment grounded in the fact that the image posted above fetched a pagan’s ransom at Sotheby’s in the early spring auction. Sold to an undisclosed New York collector, it broke all previous Malaspina records at € 684,000

Ouch.

B A K A

In typical European fashion, Currado Malaspina ignorantly conflates concepts and images of non-Western cultures, churns them into a torpid mush and calls it art. In a recent group exhibition at the Musée d'Art de Hesian on Boulevard de Clichy entitled “Ragoût Est/Ouest,” Malaspina presented fifteen drawings based (very) loosely on the complex ethos of Japan’s pre-industrial military nobility. Titles like Imagawa, Tokugawa and Shingen suggest direct references to the Samurai, yet the flaccid naked figures with their tightly muffined hair look like caricatures of inactive Sumo wrestlers.

None of this pendulous ambiguity deterred soft drink magnate Tony Ichinomiya from buying up the whole series. He plans to build a wing on his Honshu summer dacha just to hang his substantial yet inconsequential Malaspina collection.

FAILING UPWARD

When the Corsican collector Moisés Natali purchased, sight unseen, the entire portfolio of Currado Malaspina’s Maldoror drawings from the unscrupulously successful Rive Gauche art dealer Samassi Arsène, not a few eyebrows were raised. When Natali returned half the pieces as “unsuitable for the home of my virgin daughters,” a wave of skepticism engulfed the 5th arrondissement like a tropical monsoon.

The dubious virtue of the Natali girls notwithstanding, the drawings themselves were not free from controversy.

When the tainted works were returned to the market, an exhibition was held at the Palais de Cupidité’s sumptuous Hall of Divinities. The critics were divided but the public was enthralled. A record shattering seven hundred thousand visitors were swept up by the art and the accompanying succès de scandale. Gary Hoffmansthal of The Guardian called it a “a crass circus of low-brow hucksterism that would make even Damien Hirst soil his cottons”

Les Chants de Maldoror

It all started on a dare. Georges Perec publicly challenged Currado Malaspina to read the entire oeuvre of Henri Barbusse. From the solipsistic eros of L’Enfer through the horrific violence of Le Feu all the way to the revoltingly hagiographic Staline: Un Monde Nouveau Vu à Travers un Homme.

Malaspina hated Perec with the passion one reserves for those one envies most. So while laboring through the turgid prose of Le Couteau Entre les Dents, Currado decided to do Perec one better. He added De Nerval, Sade, Laureamont and Mirbeau to the pot and in an empty gesture of literary bravado, invited Perec, (who at the time was clearly too obsessed with the barrage of critical attacks on the Oulipo group), to join him.

Twenty years in the making, Currado has recently unveiled his long awaited series of drawings based on some of the French literary canon’s most provocative works.
Exhibited recently at Gerard/Shah on Place Paul-Painlevé, these works show the breadth of Malaspina’s deep penetration into some of the most disturbing literature of our time. He has truly conjured a visual equivalent to the dissonance and beauty these works so strongly convey.

Whether it is true that his wife left him due to his complete absorption in this project is something I cannot verify with any certainty.

SYNESTHESIA

Synesthesia – or the merging of the senses – is an enterprise that Currado Malaspina has devoted himself to sporadically and unsystematically. Each time he attempts to make works of art to be “ingested” through multiple means he has failed with miserable nobility. Like the knight-errant Alonso Quixano, Malaspina is a mythmaker, an unpaid dreamer, a follower of phantoms and ultimately a fool.

He’s in Euboea right now, renting a small cabin on a quiet cul-de-sac on the east side of Chalcis. He told me that he is spending most of his time reading Juvenal’s Satires and listening to Parsifal on his I-Pod. Occasionally, in order to offset the blunting of the senses that comes from forced isolation and habit, he visits Madame Erzulie’s very upscale gentleman’s club where he has taken an unhealthy fancy to the portly nineteen-year old twins Indra and Inemes.

He is also making small sketches of imaginary Greek sculptures and sending them to friends with cryptic annotations written on the backs. I received the drawing above with the phrase “dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range” scrawled in a near indecipherable handwriting as if his hand were a club or a charred twig dipped in brine.

A BOUNTY OF NAMES

Last week I was in Paris, attending the Bourvil Institute’s annual Saussure Conference and catching up with my good friend Currado Malaspina. I had the occasion to borrow his cell-phone and was flattered to find on the dormant screen of the diminutive apparatus, an image of one of my drawings.

Taken by this unexpected high-tech homage I began to play with the tiny keys hoping to find a few more clues into Currado’s elusive temperament.

Shamelessly I scrolled down his capacious list of contacts and found that it was a veritable who’s who of global art and intellectual enterprise. Beccarie, Broad and Bourdon were followed by Cash, Deutsch and Desclos. The home phone numbers of Gogosian, Govan and Gallimard were casually listed next to the e-mail address of Currado’s grocer. Perl, Podhoretz and Prévost, each with a cutely appropriate icon were listed next to his dry cleaner Quentin Polak. It was astonishing to learn just how many illustrious people were in his orbit.

Before returning the phone, I discreetly copied down the number of Dahlia Danton with whom I lost contact several years ago after a rather acrimonious disagreement.

I tried the number when I retuned to L.A. I got her voice-mail but didn’t leave a message.

BOOK REVIEW

The more one knows about Currado Malaspina the more the creeping vines of mystery obscure any true understanding.

The French playwright, Stephanie Arnoux, whose Sapphisme recently earned the coveted Prix Cornette for best drama of 2007, struggles in her recent book, Malaspina and the Trembling Blaze to clarify our misconceptions and illuminate our understanding.

That she ultimately fails does not diminish her heroic effort but rather highlights her general thesis that Currado Malaspina is the most enigmatic and complex artist since Marcel Duchamp.

I highly recommend her book to anyone who is the least bit interested in the current trends of contemporary art.

THE SONG OF DEGREES

The lamp of bittersweet reminiscence burns dimly yet dependably. The 15th anniversary of Micah Carpentier’s wretchedly received exhibition of paper bag drawings in Havana’s Grand Theatre is upon us.

David Schoffman and I plan to mark the occasion by mocking our innocence in a runnel of tears.

I remember so well, Micah, with tortured anticipation, installing each of his seven-hundred bags as if it were a sacrament. I can still hear the scraping of is well-worn eraser making last minute addendums, luring his life’s work to a state of near perfection.

The unschooled and the ambivalent were lulled by the malicious into greeting the work with contempt. The gods were appeased only by his death.

THE MAN - THE LEGEND - THE LORE

Movie Trailer, MICAH CARPENTIER, Release date: October 2008

Eastern European television is a tone poem to attenuated life spans. Production values are as uncomplicated as a waiting room flower arrangement while the programming is an arbitrary collage of nacreous fluff. Everything is brief, colorful and blandly nubile.

It was fitting that while vacationing this past summer at the Szechenyi Spa in Budapest, I happened upon this commercial while channel surfing in my hotel room.

I’m now trying to get my hands on the actual Micah Carpentier film. The image of my dear departed friend working in his Havana studio tore at the scab of my grief. I miss that bandit terribly.

MERCURIAL MALASPINA

Micah Carpentier Films recently released a short film about Currado Malaspina that was recently screened at Cinémathèque Rouen to a hostile audience of Dante scholars. It was almost immediately pirated and grainy DVD's are already circulating around the flea markets of Paris.

I suppose that now that it's fair game and that its content is so vitally important to understanding this complex man, I thought it appropriate to post it on the blog.

Postscript: Contrary to the review in Le Nouvel Ops that listed David Schoffman as one of the producers of the film, I had nothing to do with any aspect of the work at all.

THE VERROCCHIO CODE

At the 23rd Annual Conference of Arts and Letters held last month in Bareggio, Currado Malaspina startled the assembled crowd when he presented his unsubstantiated theory that Verrocchio was a woman.

It has long been suspected that the third figure from the right in Santo Spirito’s Saint Monica is a self-portrait. The fact that her back is turned toward the viewer indicates strongly, according to Malaspina’s far-flunged hypothesis, that the artist had something to hide.

Furthermore, it is significant that the painting in question depicts the mother of Augustine, the saint who famously devoted himself to the pleasures of the senses prior to his convenient return to faith and reflection. Like the memoirists of today, Augustine realized that on the page, vice was more gripping than virtue, so long as the author finds redemption before book’s end.

Verrocchio, according to Currado, was deeply shamed by his shape-shifting gender-hopping and sought a similar, Augustinian absolution through his wonderfully innovative depiction of religious imagery and his all consuming devotion the Florentine clergy.

After delivering his paper, the conference recessed and over coffee and cake, enjoyed a screening of Barbara Streisand’s Yentl.

TEMPERED VEHEMENCE

The short-lived periodical ZUT was a joint venture that included literary lights, Sonia Bartov and Camille Zohnenstein, the bad girl of Cabaret, Tiquette Perdu and the painters, Fédeau Mombart, Molly Rosienne and Anne de Dornay. At the height of its popularity it had a monthly circulation of over 75,000 loyal subscribers.

Among its early contributors was Currado Malaspina. Although he was banished from its advisory board after the fourth issue, (his torrid affair with Bartov, a squalid tempest of depravity that ended in shame for the two of them was the cause of his eviction), he left his typically indelible mark on the magazine’s future.

The inaugural issue, simply titled ZUT, had its cover designed by Malaspina, and was printed in an edition of two hundred. A recent copy was recently auctioned on Ébai-France for
EUR 400,000. (I, unfortunately, sold all my back issues at the marchè au puce for a pittance before moving back to the States.)

What I do have are memories, which some would argue (unpersuasively) are more valuable than coin. The one I cherish most dearly revolves around the week Currado, Sonia, Camille and I worked on the Absinthe issue (ZUT I, no.3).

Our intensive research rendered an awareness of the beautiful fragility of the small hands of fate. We drank our poppied poison till its charms turned toxic and each of us in our own personal way saw the dreadful ecstasy of dissipation.

I have never felt my senses as profoundly again.

FESSES QUI VOLE

TailWinds, Currado Malaspina’s fabled rebuttal of the biblical creation myth is a forty by sixty foot mural, famously installed at the Lourmarin Aerodrome. Commissioned by the Fédération Laïque Luberonois, the giant picture has become an important sight of secular pilgrimage. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a hallowed venue for communist youth groups and militant Hungarian atheists.

Critics have noted that the imagery seems to be a cross between Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten By A Lizard, but Currado will have none of that. He sees the work simply as an anti-clerical, visual homiletic that splashes a few cheerful colors on the walls of baggage claim.

An oversized postcard of the image is available at most French airports though due to its volatile subject, most of the country's post offices refuse to let it circulate through the mail.

THOU SHALT NOT

In his treatise Il Cortegiano, Baldassare Castiglione outlined his conception of the complete personality - manners, taste, corporal vigor and a disposition that favors anonymity. Currado Malaspina famously quipped that The Courtier was the West’s first self-help manual.

Throughout the years, Currado has become increasingly obsessed with man’s preoccupation with advice. It struck him that regardless of the culture, the ideals propagated by elders, kings and philosophers never seemed to apply to him. He took no pointers from Plato, no direction from Demosthenes and between Oprah, Deepak and Dr. Ruth there were no recommendations worth considering, even as a temporary experiment in human conduct.

Several years ago, Currado the Jester decided to create a compendium of all worldly wisdom, compressed, distilled and fully illustrated on conveniently sized post-its, so that these behavioral reminders could easily be affixed to notebooks, laptops and refrigerators.

He started with the grossly over-rated Ten Commandments, zeroing in on the first two, which he found particularly inconvenient to the artist’s vocation.

WHIPLASH

Sharp flashes of lucid observation fill the brilliant pages of Beauty Fails, Currado Malspina’s 2002 anthology of notes, dreams and jeremiads. Originally published by Palmira Press, it is Malaspina’s first prose work in English.

His rough knuckled illustrations fan across each page creating the faint impression of an illuminated book of hours. In fact, one short essay in which he describes a restless longing for an estranged colleague’s alluring young wife is entitled O Intemerata.

It is endlessly rewarding, charting the dingy grottos of Currado’s tactless imagination. Connolly Rothschild famously described Beauty Fails as “a libertine primer on liberty” and assigned it each year to his creative writing students at Yale.

Rothschild’s sudden demission from the English department may have been the result of a rising tide of censorious priggishness but no one in New Haven is talking.

BARBAROUS GRUDGE

Weather has always played a big part in the mercurial behavior of Currado Malaspina. Curiously, his mood turns darker as the sun shines brighter – summer being his worst season. As Parisian women shed raiments like serpents shedding skins, the streets become what Currado likes to call “un carnaval de décolletage.” And yet, to a man whose world is illuminated by the lamp, climate has its own peculiar consequence.

As a child, Malaspina would spend the month of August with an invalided aunt in the tiny village of Agnac in Lot-et Garonne. The Aquitaine can be a magical place for a child with its lush plum orchards and mysterious chateaux. For young Currado it was an annual agony.

Small for his age, the local children would subject him to wildly imaginative torments and unspeakable abuse. Ever since, heat and pain have been linked in Currado’s mind.

Young Malaspina took solace in sketching and many examples of his juvenilia are still extant. The Dordogne Museum of Contemporary Art recently staged an exhibition in honor of Currado’s sixty-fifth birthday and in it were several of these very early drawings.

One of Currado’s erstwhile tormentors is the eminent art critic, Raoul Contout who, in reviewing the show in Paris Match recalled their early summers, quipping, “the short child grew into the large man of elephantine ego and slight achievement.”

Children can be so cruel.

UNRATIFIED BRILLIANCE

Although there were neither witnesses nor any known record or transcript, there is no shortage of speculation regarding the legendary four-hour walk Currado Malaspina took with the Italian psychoanalyst E. Barba Giovedi.

Malaspina puzzled for many years over the nature of his work and its putative relationship to his personal history. He struggled for years with his despairing pessimism and often wondered if his dark disposition was necessary for his creativity. As a lifelong serial philanderer, he wrestled with his conscience and his oppressive remorse. As a pasticheur of other people’s ideas he was pained by his unexceptionalism despite his early promise.

In short, he was a shell, a ruin, an empty vessel masquerading as a genius for the benefit of a credulous and adoring public.

I will not add to the unsubstantiated rumors but I will simply note that after that famed meeting, Currado produced the series of monotypes that have justly earned him a sacred place in the annals of contemporary French art history.

He has since replaced his old neuroses with new, more eccentric ones and has no intention of addressing them clinically.

CATALEPTIC CRAYONS

Of all the illustrated editions of the Divine Comedy that I have come across, the one closest to my heart is Currado Malaspina's Beatrice In Bed.

His clumsy, irreverent drawings of Dante's beloved are so raunchy, so unbecoming of their original intent, so flagrantly personal that I am drawn to them with embarrassment. They bear no balm of refinement, their fallible formlessness are in stark contrast to the relentless musicality of the poem’s terza rima. Vinegary pigment, inelegant brushstrokes and text scrawled as if by the beak of a marsh cock crowd his sheets in a panic of dissonant misbehavior.

But beneath the work’s gassy astringencies there is a ripe, affirming tenderness that parallels the poet’s own grueling transformation. Few artists have been able to capture so vividly the Commedia’s imperium of uncertainty and incomplete redemption.

It's a pity that the book is out of print.

CONSTRUCTION DUST

Currado Malaspina once told me that during the course of a lifetime, a man can expect his soul to bend four times: Once in doubt, once in anticipation, once in despair and once in agony.

The longest period is despair.

Life, he told me, is like the narrow bones of the fingers, incessantly in motion and perpetually at risk. To plan and to wager are one. Even our most subtle utterances are but the guttural hackings of a beast.

His favorite poem is Yuntas by César Vallejo.

Completamente. Además, mundo!
Completamente. Además, polvo!


Completely, Furthermore, world!
Completely, Furthermore, dust!

And yet, as I write this, construction proceeds with the methodical urgency only a narcissist could be capable of. In the Normandy village of St Germain sur Ay, a 5000 square foot, beachfront studio complex, complete with an intaglio workshop, two darkrooms, an editing facility and a skylit painting atelier is being built for the pessimistic Malaspina.

I suppose despair has been good for business.

NO LIQUOR STRONGER

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Tuhija Repo, Finland’s infamous poète maudit. He goes on to write in his famous essay “The New Magnetic Fields,” that, “intimacy is to betrayal as scotch is to bourbon. Like the belted kingfisher whose predatory rattle signals life and death in one loud cry, we smugly roar through life’s uncertainties, using the language of conviction to express the hesitant disquiet of irreconcilable doubt.”

Repo’s words come to mind as I ruminate upon the current state of my kinship with Currado Malaspina. My love for him has made me vulnerable to his fickle conceits. And yet, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

Homo homini lupus perhaps sums it all up, however glibly. Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” observed that, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

In Currado Malaspina, I have found both needs bundled into one onerous receptacle.

Je suis coupable.

PREDESTINATION

Few people remember that Currado Malaspina was born on October 1st 1953 and that his godfather was Francis Picabia. It was at Currado’s christening at L’Église Saint-Suplice where Picabia horrified the congregants by declaiming over the chorister’s sweet rendition of “The Little Road to Bethlehem,” his oft quoted aphorism, “It’s really only nonentities who have genius in their lifetime.”

Picabia died the following month and the episode in church became an absent hour in the Malaspina household.

One can’t help but speculate whether the luminous star of Picabia’s difficult intelligence somehow lodged like a paperweight within Currado’s subconscious. When one thinks of Malaspina’s work one realizes how he has consistently operated within the solemn, slow voice of satire. Currado’s limitless capacity for impudence, his constant sniffing for sacred targets among the croupiers of the art world, his indifference to consequence, all evidence an irrational tenderness toward Picabian self-sabotage.

Currado Malaspina continues in his sixth decade, to be the incendiary guttersnipe, thumbing his trunk at the Brahmins of le beau monde. He convulsively makes art that throws a disquieting light on our melancholy failures.

Currado truly is a “monster of courage.”

FRIENDLY CONTOURS

Alfredo Bossi’s strange volume “Squared But Not Unlovely,” is a compendium of profiles, containing charming vignettes of interesting people. Arranged in alphabetical order, the book begins with an uproarious reminisce on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and ends with a heartbreaking screed about Chinese painter Zhao Wuji. No entry exceeds a page and some are just a paragraph or two. The texts are superimposed over a typically unrelated image. None of the images are attributed, though some are easily recognizable as Bossi’s own work.

Between Gilka Machado and Michael Melchior is a leaf devoted to Currado Malaspina and his well-documented fear of shadows. Well acquainted with phobias, Bossi’s account avoids all mockery and is one of the book’s most quotable sections.

FREE ENTERPRISE

Last spring at the Institute for Advanced Lateral Studies in Tours, Currado delivered a lecture entitled “The Cruelties of Choice”. In it he laid out what has by now become a familiar theme for people who follow Malaspina’s work. Essentially it describes artistic volition as a series of accidental “wagers,” intuitive predictions made in what Currado calls “the broken mist of misdirected reverie” (rêverie mal dirigée”).

Though well received by the audience at the time, his thesis became extremely controversial when the text was later published in the literary journal Faucon. Michel Encapuchonné, director of L’Ecole Niveau Bas de Paris was “dumbfounded by its witless arguments, gaseous yearnings and clownish inurgency.” Writing in L’Arte Aujourd’hui Brigitte Mamelon called Malaspina “a desperate blow-hard who mangles sentiment with spurious intellectualism and improvable daydreams.”

Currado was understandably hurt and dismayed but remained extremely practical as the events unfolded. Sensing an opportunity, together with the impresario Markus Ohrenschmalz, he staged a public debate at the Palais Garnier, which was televised live on TF2. The spectacle proved both profitable and entertaining and at the present time Currado is negotiating with Cable Statique for a regular series of provocative interviews and disputations.

The working title, loosely translated is “Try To Make Me Cry.”

PAS LAID

The wandering intellect of Currado Malaspina is well known. Embroidered through the myth of the man are tales of his staggering erudition and demonic wit. Few people outside France however, know what Currado looks like. Though lionized in Europe, his name in America scarcely stirs a whimper, (my loyal readers excepted).

Ruggedly handsome, he is often confused for Russian film star Pyotr Mamonov, a fact that has yielded several comical and embarrassing consequences for both of them. Due to his very public affair with fashion model Nicolosa Giannini, Currado has been a ubiquitous presence on European television. And when the photojournalist George Pollexfen published his best selling book “Men,” it was Currado who appeared on the cover.

It is for this reason that I am posting two pictures of my dear friend. The first is clipped from the “Style Desuet” section of the March 18th edition of Le Figaro that accompanied an article about flower arrangements particular to the 18th arrondisement. The second is the cover of Pollexfen’s book.