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.