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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.
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
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
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.
