Visages des damnés

The Windward Correctional Center, fourteen miles east of Blieblerville, Texas on Highway 159 is a long way from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques where my dear friend Currado Malaspina usually spends the month of August. He is there suffering the cauterizing swelter to pay homage to a man he grew to love.

Malaspina standing in front of one of his portraits of Lanier Christian Smith, 2012

Lanier Christian Smith was a drifter, a drunk and an inveterate liar but one thing he was not was a cold-blooded murderer. And yet on March 21st, 2012, strapped to a pale grey gurney he was treated to an intravenous cocktail of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride and paid the ultimate price.

Currado got to know Smith the same way he became acquainted with half a dozen other convicted murders - drawing his portrait. 

Some people have described Portraits of the Damned as the most odious, rank and repugnant exercise in artistic exploitation since King Ferdinand II of Aragon hired Antonio Dufréy to paint heretics burning at the stake. Others see Malaspina as a modern day Goya, giving visual voice to the silent horrors of state sponsored violence and corruption.

I see it as a pretentious hustle but in this day and age the margin between stunt and the sublime is narrowly ambiguous. 

Between May of 2007 and April 2012 Currado Malaspina went to South Dakota, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania visiting over twenty maximum security prisons in order to draw condemned men and women.  The works were ultimately exhibited in Paris at the Musée de la Peine on Rue St.-Louis en l’Île under the Dantesque title "Visages des damnés."

He is back in Texas for a memorial service for L. C. Smith, as well as for a book signing promoting a small art house publication about the works called The Faces of Fate.

A FINAL FLINT OF FEELING

Currado Malaspina has turned the monkey-jump of misery into an expression of full-throated agony. Leafy fables and grand parables of tragic undoing fill the grave-gray sheets of Currado's newest work. He has encrypted reservoirs of confession, contrition and regret within the stunted script that pack the margins of his recent drawings. Lanes and labyrinths of runty writing course through the thirty-six grief filled pages that comprise the Palimpseste series - completed in secret over the past fifteen years. Recently published by Litografia Fica, a limited edition of prints has recently been made available by Currado's Milanese dealer Athanasius Lafréry.

Tales of thievery, cruelty, adultery, vanity, lechery, jealousy, heresy and false witness are wretchedly woven into painful professions of lassitude, collapse and grief. The bleak elegiac tone of the text is so heartbreaking that even Currado's many detractors have looked upon this new work with sympathy.

Like most of Malaspina's work, the focus is on the female form but in this instance, the figures are no longer anonymous objects of desire but rather specific human beings. Each work is a sackclothed summery of love, lust and betrayal, complete with names and places and dates. It is a roving, ripe, diaristic prattle, completely devoid of all discretion.

But even within this humble darkness, Currado has still managed to vulgarize what could have been seen as an aging ode to innocence. He has been recently working with a team of Italian screenwriters turning his ponderous, heartfelt atonement into a toothless tendril for daytime television.