Tuesday, June 30, 2009

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.”