RETOOLING EPICTETUS

 "MAGNIFICENCE INVOLVES EXPENDITURES WHICH WE CALL HONORABLE"

Currado Malaspina

This Artistotelian formulation finds its way into the daily conversation of my pretentious colleague, Currado Malaspina, at the most absurd and inappropriate times. He carries a worn copy of the Nicomachean Ethics in his coat pocket and quotes from it freely. In the aftermath of a minor traffic accident at the traitorous intersection of Rue Juliette Dodu and Avenue Claude Vellefaux, Currado observed to the irate owner of a newly dented Citroën Saxo that "... the morally weak who lose themselves in impetuous emotion are better than those who have a rational principle but do not abide by it." When his car insurance was subsequently canceled he bemoaned how "small people may have charm ... but not beauty."

Currado embodies Paul Valéry's description of the poetic temperament, "the sensation of being everything and the certitude of being nothing." He is both pompous and pure, deliriously megalomaniacal and comically self-effacing. E. M. Cioran, another Malaspina favorite, suggested that "the company of mortals is, for a lucid man, pure torture," and this explains Currado's lack of close friends.

In a 1997 interview with Haftora Magazine Currado confided to renown clinical psychologist Beto Azzuri that his eminent sense of detachment is a bias as flawed as any other. "I recognize death and exile (la mort et l'exile) as the mitigating arteries of the well-intentioned life (la vie bien intentionnée)," he began promisingly enough, "but covetousness (convoitise) is the human condition and should not be tampered with too dramatically."

AN AWAKENING

Dear friend, I have reread the Gospels in my newfound confinement and the inscrutable conclusions that I have drawn are painfully disquieting ....

So states the bizarre missive that sits on my desk like a naked fuse. From the Boisset  psychiatric hospital where my long suffering friend Currado Malaspina is now taking the cure, lengthy manifestos and rambling disquisitions are springing from his pen with a stridency bordering on the erotic.

He has found religion, though I'm not quite certain toward which deity he directs his faith.

He frequently mentions Saint John Climacus, also known as John the Ladder, who from the Vatos Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai lived a barren life of pious asceticism. The undeniably beautiful drawing above was sent to me recently, inscribed on the back with one of the 7th century monk's most curious aphorisms:

"He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted: those who are inclined to purity are not so."

Currado has taken a physical detour which has unquestionably anchored him in a self-knowledge previously inaccessible.

MADNESS BECOMES CURRADO

BATHED IN ABSINTHIAN WISTFULNESS & MELANCHOLIC NOSTALGIA, CURRADO MALASPINA SITS BY THE WINDOW OF HIS SMALL CELL AND SKETCHES SCENES FROM HIS PAST.

  
Rough, awkward but unmistakably heartfelt,  Currado Malaspina's small new drawings are a sad, strong testament to his decayed vanity. Scrawled with a primitive hand-carved quill, these precious tracings are explicit maps of his wretched, broken mind.


In 1998, as a guest of Charo Valrhona, Cuba's genteel Minister of Arts and Sports, Currado was feted by the island's top luminaries. He played tennis with three time Olympic champion Donatello Borges, sang madrigals with the immortal coloratura Dobry Den Esponoza, discussed Hegel with the controversial cultural critic Djudeo Espanyol and went horseback riding with Fidel's nephew, the great harness racer Ocucaje Castro.


 His very public romance with the very married Romina Magia of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba was the cause of great scandal.  A vigil of international journalists camped in front of the Bosque Hotel in central Havana where he rented a suite of rooms. When Romina's husband Francesco blackened Currado's lower lip under the reproachful gaze of Che Guevara, the hungry shutters clicked in a tap dance of prurient fascination.


The other day, I received in the mail the above drawing. On the back was an inscription which read: "c'était la valeur la douleur."

CURRADO'S DEMONS

I often puzzle over the shrill and petty tone Currado takes when he writes about me and my work.Though I'm not one who is quick to take offense, the cumulative effect of his snide screeds and astringent asides is a weight I must reluctantly bear.

Hospitalier Spécialisé de Boisset, Western wall

Hospitalier Spécialisé de Boisset is a psychiatric care facility near the Dordogne River Valley. Among its illustrious alumni are the writers Shmuel Jacot and Delphine Issey-Ponqet, the painters Koloy and Iguire and the great mid-century songsmith Vuillet de Monchard.

At the time of this writing, residing in said hospital and under the watchful eye of both admirable and dubious clinicians is my poor, dear friend, Currado Malaspina.

It seems he has been diagnosed as paranoiac, His condition is apparently exacerbated by his drug addictions. I'm told he is delusional and unstable. He alternates between states of lyric eloquence and deranged hysteria. He's willfully incontinent. He doesn't eat.

I have chosen to attribute Currado Malaspina's demoniac diatribes to his nascent madness.

He still has his computer so don't expect an abatement of his attacks any time soon.

CURRADO'S CAPACIOUS CURIOSITY

The Mendoza Archive in Metz is a trove of  legal documents, odd dissertations, illuminated manuscripts and scholarly tomes. During a recent trip to nearby Pont-à-Mousson visiting my good friend Currado Malaspina, we stopped by the archive and met with its director, Yves Mendès-Faure.

The Tupfen Sephirot, 17th century

Dr. Mendès-Faure, whose most recent book Thwarted Sensation in Lurianic Ecstatic Literature (Provo Press 2010), is a specialist in Cordoveran Kabbalah. Together with A. Gashmi and Jimmy Ramak, he compiled and edited the complete correspondence of Abu Ahmad Ja'far ibn 'Ubaid and Khitan Liao. As director of the archive he has curated several exhibitions of Judaica including the controversial Sephirot Ensemble which assembled over four-hundred Sephirot images, hand-painted by gentiles.

Currado wanted to see John Donne's famous Tupfen painting but we were told it had been stolen in a daredevil burglary while on exhibit in Rabat. The image above is a reproduction from the Encyclopédie d'Ésotérisme.

עשרת הדיברות

On the wide double-door of his professional Axima frigo, Currado Malaspina has a curious grouping of post-it notes. Not your typical reminders of doctor's appointments or grocery lists but behavioral prompts straight out of one of his favorite books, the Old Testament.

The Decalogue has always been a source of conflict for my agnostic friend. Whereas he has no trouble with "thou shalt not steal," (unless of course it is a matter of someone's ideas), or "thou shalt not commit murder," he's always had a weakness for adultery. And though in keeping with the spirit if not the letter of the 5th commandment, (taking time throughout the years to remember his mother's birthday), he always thought that the 2nd, from the point of view of a practicing artist, was simply bad for business.

So each time he reaches in to grab a new bottle of Blanquette de Limoux he is confronted with a list of the top ten prohibitions of the ancients. It's a sobering salute to the aesthetics of the taboo.

Constraint and obstruction are  not your typical Malaspina tropes and it's hard to say whether these idiosyncratic allusions are meant to be reverential or ironic. A large lithograph depicting commandment no. 4 was recently bought by an anonymous representative of the Viljandene hasidim of Kirias Lilith, New York.  They've always been known to have a greater affinity for the burlesque then their neighbors the Bobover.

   

THE ROSSEBUURT EDITION

The series of twenty-two hand-colored aquatints known to collectors as The Rossebuurt Edition have finally been exhibited in the city of their origin.

Aafje, 1981

Photographers have depicted the courtesans of the Rossebuurt as shop window bibelots and Hollywood has turned them into a metaphor for raunchy cupidity but it was not until Currado Malaspina applied his tender touch has the subject been treated with the refinement and respect it deserves.

Amsterdam's Galerij Coenraad Johannes on Prinsengracht has recently staged a stunning exhibition that included all twenty-two prints plus scores of studies, proofs and related works-on-paper. Inspired by the play La Bulesca and the letters of Veronica Franco these lovely images are touching tributes to a class of women typically maligned by coarse caricature.

Like most mortals, Currado is not exempt from the fineries of cliché. In the course of his extensive research he developed a near fanatical obsession with the storied seductress, Aafje Minahasan. He pleaded with her to leave the dubious comforts of the Doop Horenkast and live with him as man and girlfriend.


She wisely demurred and is currently the aging mistress of a former Minister of Immigration and Asylum.

I LUSSURIOSI

Currado Malaspina has been working on a series of hand-colored monotypes based on Dante's depiction of the second circle of Hell.

SEMIRAMÌS, Malaspina, 2010

Malaspina has always insisted that Dante's condemnation of these carnal malefactors was at best halfhearted. As a lapsed Catholic and a strident opponent of chastity this is hardly surprising.

What seems far more astonishing is that this new completed series will be published in book form by Fedeli Edizioni, the official publishing house of L'Ordine di San Otto.

Michele Scottman, principle editor of Fideli is "thrilled to publish this important artistic document" and sees no conflict with its subject matter or style. Pre-ordered advance copies of the first edition have already sold out and Scottman predicts that I Lussuriosi will out perform Fideli's last major blockbuster,I Modi di Preghiera Estatica in Roma di Secolo Diciassettesima. 

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HOMO LUDENS

There are hundreds of little slips of paper tacked on the walls of Currado Malaspina's Rue Picot studio. If you ask him about the significance of these miniature cryptograms, most likely he'll shrug and quickly change the subject.

There's a pained eloquence about these somber images. I've often speculated about their meaning. Throughout the years I have arrived at a number of vague surmises.

1. These are nothing but idle doodlings, freely associated images void of any allusion or narrative.

2. Based on the texts, these are shards of violent fantasies, tiny testaments to a diseased mind.

3. Considering Currado's extensive priapic peregrinations, these are diminutive trophies, capricious aide-mémoires, carnal baseball cards, virile notches scratched with the swagger of an aging Lothario.

4. Though never much of a collector of the works of others, these are drawings done by another hand entirely. Based on certain stylistic oddities, most likely the artist in question is Micah Carpentier .

I welcome any insight from any of my readers who are familiar the works in question.

EVERY LOVE IS LAUDABLE

The mighty rabble of unreason, the prattlers of the pulpit, the blind banqueters of inanity, the blatherers, drivelers, twaddlers and knaves have all declared Currado Malaspina a menace to our young. "Obsédé par la gouttière" was how Monseigneur Eustace Etherlburga, pastor of L'Eglise Sainte de Chapele, Brabant described him in his weekly radio address last Sunday.

L'Animo ch'e` Creato ad Amar Presto, 1979

He may have been referring to a little known group of works-on-paper entitled "Felicità Raggiunta". Originally intended to illustrate the offbeat poems of Becolade Leonidas, the Raggiunte's graphic muscle was deemed ill-suited and inappropriate by Leonidas' long time publisher Gulyan Puratos.

The small suite of drawings surfaced recently at Bloedpens Bruxelles on rue Duquenois just off of Le Grand Place. A third-rate gallery on the fourth floor of a furniture warehouse, Bloedpens typically traffics in fake Hergé lithographs and the teacup poodle gouaches of Aimeus Gaufres. It turns out Malaspina's ex-wife Anaïs maliciously unloaded reams of Currado's early work in order to flood the market and subject her erstwhile husband's reputation to a good old fashioned lashing.

Fat chance!

Etherlburga's jeremiad has only added to the Malaspina spell. When last checked, the wait-list to acquire anything by Currado Malaspina, regardless of period or quality is about as long as the Antwerp Yellow Pages. 


There's no such thing as bad publicity. Wasn't Tintoretto referred to as "the Menace of Venice"?
 

THE TERRIBLE PRICE OF HIGH CULTURE

Finally, after the difficult copyright negotiations, the pious familial hand-wringing, the censorious governmental grandstanding and the overly cautious publishing house indecision, the full and complete edition of The Letters of Currado Malaspina is set for release!

This is bad news.

Not for me. No. Not for Currado. Not for Gallimardon, the Beaubourg, the Nouvelle Revue Marginale de Livres, TF2, the  Bibliothèque Calomnieux or the Académie de Trésors Nationaux. No. All of the above stand to profit regally not to say obscenely.

No. This is bad news for the many people, dare I say, the many women (for the lion's share of addressees are women) whose intimate confidences are about to be betrayed. Careers will be ruined, marriages destroyed, trusts violated and reputations sullied.

And for what??

For a few hundred beautifully annotated, erotically charged and delicately rendered epistolary drawings. 

Hélas 

HERMENEUTICS

Maquette Pour Le Marquis #9

Though it pains me to say this, my dear friend Currado Malaspina has allowed himself to be infantilized by those closest to him.  Those loving people who indulge his idiosyncratic posturing, his inconsonant and strident courtliness are doing him no favors.

Forgive my priggish propriety, my innocent (some might say chaste) instinct for discretion, but the savage audacity of Les Maquettes du Marquis goes a bit too far.  With its shamelessly impudent luster, it conceals its detestable nature behind a bravura of painterly effects.

And yet, to my astonishment, this new series of works has been warmly if not ecstatically received by the critics and the public in equal measure! The day I visited the exhibition - a balmy though overcast early autumn afternoon, the kind of day where Parisians find  lenient repose, a trim to their shock of vacation's adjournment - the line to enter the gallery wound itself, hydra-like, around Jardin Arago.  

To add to my bewilderment, ´Epître Magazine featured a cover story by no less of an authority than Tabatha Coralie, devoting sixteen pages to a detailed exegetic summery of the entire Malaspina oeuvre!

I love Currado, but is something getting lost in translation?

INJUDICIOUS DICTATION

The double contract, the skin and the immortal idol of love is but a pebble in the mouth of my good and flawed friend Currado Malaspina. The grateful gaiety which greeted his recent exhibition at Gallerie Livarot provoked in me nothing but a night-sweat of awkward embarrassment. 

Maquettes de Marquis no. 14

 

 

 

 

For a man who drinks the fruit of life clenched within the lenience of raffish corruption, the Maquettes de Marquis series of drawings is just a flowerly coverlet of imposture. It's a carnival of melodrama posing as debauchery. It's license without lewdness. Simulated wickedness in the altercloth of expressionism.

Currado, be chivalrous in your defeat and stop simmering in the mildew of petty provocations. Try to retrieve the raw air of your innocent jejunity. Your new work, the overcooked cousin of your erstwhile genius, mocks the garbled loyalty of your purblind partisans.

SHRINES AT A CARNIVAL

Currado Malaspina, Auvers-sur-Oise 1972

Not quite juvenilia though far from the chiselled concision of his present exchequerie, the Val-d'Oise landscapes pose an interesting problem for Malaspina scholars. The cascading froth of ecstatic brushwork is so unlike the pithy quicksilver of his more mature handwriting that many have attributed the radical shift to what historians now refer to simply as "the motorcycle accident." 

Fifteen days in a coma and nearly as many blood transfusions, Currado Malaspina emerged from the scaffolded flames of near-death entirely transformed. His youthful temperament of optimism and joy became a trampled Troy of ruin. His broken bones were easily mended but his hammered heart turned cold. For years  he has kept his Lucifer on a short leash of civility. His work, a phosphorent salvo of discontent, is another story.

Currado Malaspina, Argenteuil 1971

Let's all be grateful for his misfortune.

Currado Malaspina, 2009

Lecture d'Été

In the extensive journals that Currado Malaspina kept from the winter of 1983 through the fall of 2003, no detail, no matter how inappurtenant was deemed too trivial for inclusion. This impressive catalog of events and emotions was recently published in an abridged form and in limited edition by Éditions Rénale. Plushly illuminated with the peculiar drawings that were interleaved throughout the original, this rare volume is essential to the understanding of Currado's peripatetic imagination. Aptly titled Saisons de l'Impiété et Incrédulité should be on everyone's summer reading list.

INACCESSIBLE BLISS

The ravishments of romance are routine in the work and life of Currado Malaspina.  Night's plush reflections, ecstatic transformation, the supple female figure ... paint.

A series of casual oil paintings, void of precious ornament, piously attentive to the ambiance of fulsome, perhaps even obsessive affection was recently exhibited at the Museu de Detalhes Poéticos in Belém do Pará.

The catalog essay by Danita Marcil is a rhapsody of luminous albeit superficial analysis. Much is made of the mysterious identity of the model, a fretful exercise in pedantic speculation.

The woman in question, whose unmistakably honeyed flesh is an ardent hymn to erotic iridescence is none other than Andreja Bogatyrchuk.

Andreja is the genesis of every impulse in Currado's life. She is his hallucination, his Circe, his fragrant field of easy passion and the source of his vehement despondency.

GIBBLETS FOR AN AGING MASTER

"Tous mes anciens amants ont des moustaches"

Admittedly, it was tactless.


The comment that got Currado Malaspina fired from the Universiteit van Poperinge was fortuitous, for my good friend has no real talent for teaching. He lacks the patience and generosity required for such a task. (the event was witnessed by his then student Dahlia Danton).


Truth be told, Currado is rather worshipful of women and when married, tends to err on the side of uxoriousness. The fact that for the past 22 years he has worked exclusively with the female form is evidence enough of his extreme devotion and respect.


His current exhibition at Galerie Bourrer , which despite it repetitive nature and almost stubborn lack of invention received glowing reviews. Amalie Locdu went so far as to describe the new work as "a choir and song of visual stimulation the likes of which have not been seen in Paris since the days of Balthus, Matisse and Meremaquerelle!"


With all due respect to my good friend Currado, I think he's out of gas ...

DREAMING IN THE CAVE WHERE THE SIREN SWIMS

PROUD POSILIPO

 

On a recent trip to Paris, I dropped in on my dear friend Currado Malaspina.

I reached him on the telephone and we agreed that I would come to his studio at 7:30 in the evening on Friday the 8th of January. I remember the date vividly because I had tickets for the opera the following night to see Anna Nerval as Salome.

I climbed the five flights of stairs at the appointed hour on the designated day only to find the following note tacked to his door: "Ne m'attends pas ce soir, car la nuit sera noire et blanche"

Typical Malaspina - rude, cryptic and irresistible - I broke into the studio, mostly out of frustration, though I told myself at the time it was in order to go to the bathroom.

On the walls of his studio were a dozen 10 foot high drawings all configured in the shape of a cross.

It was a staggering sight! 

Knowing that there was a strong likelihood that I would force my way in, Currado left another note  tacked to the wall near the light switch. 

"Mon front est rouge encore du baiser de la reine"

I suppose he had a decent excuse.

MISSIVES FROM MALASPINA

Most people familiar with Currado Malaspina's epistolary excesses suspect that to some degree this wonderfully gifted artist is slightly unhinged. His notes and scribbles are the subject of deep analysis from both experts in the arts and specialists in psychology. He has been likened both to Rilke and to Arthur Schnitzler. He has been compared to Balthus and to Franz Schreker. Even the names Adolf Wölfli and Jean-Baptiste de Boyer have come up from time to time.

 

  To me he's a cross between Paul Éluard and Elmer Gantry. 

 

IL FOCO LI ABBRUSCIA

A minor scandal has erupted in the Marais! Pepo Cendrars' recent short film,  Le Frisson Abattu included a raw shade of the Malaspina legend. It is well known that Currado holds the conventional decorum surrounding artist/model interaction in a heavy grief of disdain. He strongly feels that nature binds us to life by inclining us toward acts of sensual gratification. His provocative imagery is a tireless search for the appropriate metaphor for that bond. His demands on his models are famously punishing.


An "out-take" from Cendrars' film has been circulating and has divided Paris between the Malaspinusards and the anti-Malaspinusards. Some see it as a hostile breach in tradition. Others see it as a balletic shadow-play of Amour-Fou.


You decide.

THE WOOLEN LOVERS

A string of dreams where pieces of God scattered like snowflakes within the narrow halls of memory carrying with them the fragrance of olive and clove yielded a strange series of drawings by Currado Malaspina known as Les Amants de Laine. Born to be a mandarin, Malaspina's flirtation with transgression is never fully persuasive yet with this particular suite of drawings, I think he stammers toward a certain level of success. 

Brothers in Epicurus concur in this for the work appeals to those who cultivate indifference. It is a canticle to the senses and our eyes delight in its heedless, voluptuary abandon. 

In a lecture delivered to a conference of art historians in Carcassonne I heard Malaspina intone what was taken at the time as an irrational jeremiad: "The sky is heavy with dishonored sensation" ("Le ciel est lourd avec sensation déshonoré ") His work and his life can be seen as both a reprimand and a correction. To Malaspina the 'rules' simply don't apply.

IN THE ABSENCE OF GRIEF

Currado Malaspina & Zoe Bat-Leytzan
Malaspina seems to relish in the
the precarious. His unstable public and private conduct always capers on the crag of scandal. From his well-documented addiction to morphine to his gloomy obsession with fashion models and starlettes, Malaspina is a shattered cough of unhurried self-destruction.

That his career has flourished in the process says more of our societal fetish for frail celebrity than about his genuine contribution to the artistic discourse. One would have assumed that the publicity surrounding the horrific suicide of Zoe Bat-Leytzan would have been his undoing, but alas, Currado, the plaster manikin 0f monstrous unfeeling soldiers on.

MALASPINA MISSIVES

THE MALASPINA CONFERENCE