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.