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.
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