ART AND POLITICS

The Austerlitz mural project has been a daunting task. Ever since my dear friend Currado Malaspina accepted the commission it has been one misadventure after another.

Designed as a massive 30 foot wide variation on his famous Palimpseste series, Currado has employed a small army of young assistants to complete the picture on time.

The problem is that his heart is simply not in it. He no longer craves the respect and recognition he once did as a younger man. He is also relatively well-off, considering that a typical work fetches somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy-five thousand euro.

He seems to be just going through the motions and he's consigning more and more of the creative work to his most trusted aids.

As a result the quality of the draftsmanship has markedly suffered but as Malaspina rightly points out, this was also the case with Rubens.

I suppose what is most disappointing is that the City of Paris is equally ambivalent. Commissioning Currado in the first place began as just a political payoff, an act of craven, insider cronyism where some lower-level bureaucrat did some creative accounting in order to placate a government minister who happens to share a mistress with Malaspina. The result is that nobody is happy and for the foreseeable future there will be a large blemish of a picture greeting the innocent commuters of a perfectly adequate though over-lit Metro station.   

DAHLIA DANTON

The French have a nasty, petty way about them. There's a stain upon their collective character that can be summed up in the following famous unattributed aphorism:

  

Il n'y a pas une grande vertu d'être laid. 

And while my dear friend Currado Malaspina is quick to add that while there is no great virtue in being ugly there is equally no great shame in being gorgeous.

Dahlia Danton with Currado Malaspina (date unknown)

 "Je suis un esthète, he declares at every opportunity as if by claiming to be an aesthete he reserves for himself the right to treat people like Ming Dynasty earthenware or rosewood Shaker chairs. "I love to surround myself with things of beauty."

To regard people as ornaments or mere objects for the delectation of the senses is seen in the United States as something uniquely anti-social. No so in France my friend Currado insists. To use human beings in order to inspire and add refinement to one's life and to advance one's personal artistic enterprise has, to me at least, a uniquely feudal feel. But this is precisely how Malaspina operates.

And as such he insists on surrounding himself with beautiful women. 

It is highly questionable whether he is capable of treating any of these women as equals.

There is however one notable exception.

Dahlia Danton

And she knows it!

THE DIGNITY OF AGING

Freud correctly observed that man's imagination fails while trying to imagine death. My good friend Currado Malaspina reached a similar conclusion after recently undergoing a medical procedure to remove a benign skin lesion below his left ear.

Lesion of Honor, watercolor on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

A fleeting glimpse of oblivion can result in several outcomes. Slapped with the realization of inevitable decay can be a deeply humbling experience. A realignment of values in favor of the ethical, a tilt toward selflessness and gratitude is a typical reaction under these circumstances.

This, of course, was not Malaspina's response at all. For Currado an epistemological approach toward rectitude is a non-starter. He wears his reputation as a trou-du-cul with great pride. His brief brush with mortality only amplified his narcissism.

"The brilliant flame of dissipation"  (la flamme brillante de inconduite) is how he puts it, a life illuminated by sin. Nothing animates Malaspina more than the wretched glow of excess. Now that he has received his clean bill of health he is determined more than ever to satisfy his Caligula-like appetites in full.

"I am a monster," he told me the other day on the phone. 

Yes, Currado but how's your prostate?
  

TAEDIUM VITAE

The illusion of election is not something unique to artists - most religions contain a clause to that effect - but my good friend Currado Malaspina has taken this fantasy to an alpine extreme. His business card for example is a glossy self-portrait with the caption "Currado Malaspina: présenter une demande à Google."

That such a search would likely yield about two dozen pages of results should not in any way elevate the Internet into some sort of arbiter of high-cultural currency. Think for example of searching the name Lorena Bobbitt or the phrase "recipes with frozen vegetables" and you will see my point. 

Malaspina 2005

His work, though far from uninteresting, ranks well below that of his much younger contemporaries. On any given day, a leisurely stroll through the galleries of Williamsburg, Beleville or Brunnenstrasse would quickly disabuse any baby-booming nostalgic of the antique perception of Currado Malaspina as a cutting-edge or 'cool' artist.

Curators continue to insist upon his relevance but that has more to do with the average age of the museum trustee (62) than with the enduring nature of Malaspina's minor triumphs. 

Malaspina's arrogance, to be fair, is simply a mechanism for his spiritual survival for how else does one justify a life of abject selfishness. How to explain the four wives, the countless mistresses, the neglected children and the infinite injury imposed upon friend and foe alike? 

 I pity the poor guy because I'm sure that in his heart of hearts he knows his life has been one long bagatelle of imperiousness and boredom.

Maybe with his last remaining years he could divert his ennui into something more benign.

Like getting a pet.

A FATEFUL MISDIAGNOSIS

Currado Malaspina's unlikely interest in Hebraic orthography is quite accidental. It began at Paris Sportif the posh central Paris health club where my friend Malaspina gallops on the elliptical with chubby government ministers and not a few former 'vedettes de cinema francais.'  

While rifling through a pile of damp and salty smelling gym shorts in the lobby's perdus et trouvés (much to the consternation of the Police Nationale, the French have an unusual custom of placing a ragged lost and found box in conspicuous corners of a public buildings as if the nation were one big kindergarten classroom) he found what he thought was an innocent shopping list. 

In fact, thinking at first that it was Arabic, he showed the paper to the weight coach Yazid, a Berber from Mauretania by way of Madrid whose knowledge of Semitic languages was less than perfect. 

"C'est amharique," he helpfully said, inflecting his voice with the swarthy authority of the whole of Africa. And with that he roughly translated the text as "two baguettes, 100 grams of sliced ham, four bottles of Côtes de Gascogne ...." etc. etc.

It wasn't till much later that Currado learned that his crumpled sheet of paper was a lovely little lycée exercise of rhyming Hebrew couplets describing the traditional fast day of Tu Bishvat. 

By then Yazid's deception was of little import. Currado was irrevocably smitten by the naked graphic power of the flexed square lettering.

And this was the genesis of Palimpseste, Currado's great, enigmatic ouevre which has managed to simultaneously enrage la communauté Israelite and excite la communauté des collectionneurs.

Tant pis.

LA FONTAINE/NOW AND THEN

Just like here in the U.S. there is a lively debate taking place in France on the cultural and behavioral effects of social media. Neuroscientists, intellectuals, politicians, educators and artists have all weighed in on the subject. Concerns about the re-wiring of our nervous systems, the perceived diminution of our attention span, the impact on language and our relationship to imagery are all vital elements of this dynamic debate .

My dear colleague Currado Malaspina has some significant thoughts on the matter and has tested his theories at a recent symposium here in Los Angeles. The Conference on Unified Neurologic Technologies, an annual gathering of researchers, medical ethicists and moral philosophers invited Currado to deliver a paper on the evolution of poetic diction, specifically in regard to the expansion of our collective vocabularies.

He raised several important aesthetic issues such as whether words like tweet, ping, hashtag or byte could ever be rendered beautiful while under the jurisdiction of poetic intent. He spoke about the possibility of odd verb forms like to google, to IM and to Skype being used by poets without irony. He questioned the future of the pathetic fallacy when its objects become things like computers and phones. The viability of metaphor is in a state of uncertainty and Currado hoped to address the issue free from ideology or cultural critique. 

As a thought experiment Currado challenged the audience to compose sonnets whose descriptive tropes were limited to the world of IT.

One researcher from Tuscon came up with this clever couptlet:

"Your grace, your charm, your every facet
My life, my love, my visual asset."

Lyrics of love seemed to dominate. An engineer from the the Environmental Protection Agency began his poem with this wonderfully disorienting play on words:

"We're linked in love while inked undone
Linkedin a knot of Drang and Strum.
Linked to a page as grand as Cyrus,
Sublime and free of any virus." 

 It's hard to exaggerate the varied 
nature of the submissions. 

An anonymous bard delivered this gem:

"My love exceeds the bandwidth of a NASA- based mainframe
A passion that is Kindled by the sound of your screen name." 

It was interesting how meter and rhyme were adhered to by the majority of the participants and how skilled they were in its application (no pun intended).  

Even Currado tried his hand at it and had his colleagues scampering through Google Translate in order to parse through his cryptic imagery.

"Ton souris doit être mes couilles 
Ça-va ça-vient
l'ordinateur se plaint
ta chatte ronronne
Facebook, quel con." 



The debate rages on. 

 

THE NEW (OTHER) GULF

The grim business of setting up appointments, meeting curators and collectors, answering queries from curious graduate students and granting interviews to journalists who would be more at home writing for the Food Section of their local tabloid is the part of the art business that my good friend Currado Malaspina loves best.

Dahlia Danton at the Doha Women's Conference, 2013

Unlike his much younger colleague and former maîtresse primaire Dahlia Danton, Currado does not approach the task with any resentment or reluctance. Quite the contrary, Malaspina moves effortlessly from the quaint ignorance of the rich to the craven sycophancy of the critics to the earnest entreaties of aspiring young acolytes looking to advance their careers by simple propinquity. 

It's all the same to Currado. It's attention and he's addicted to it like a dog is to dirt.

And so when Abduhalikh Göktürks, Royal Sharid of Aqaba commissioned Currado for an unofficial court portrait he was tickled by the opportunity. 

Portrait of Abduhalikh, oil on canvas, Malaspina, 2013

As is well known, Aqaba's growing community of art collectors has shaken up the market beyond recognition. The recent opening of The Sovereign Jordanian Museum of Contemporary Art has signaled nothing less than a sea change in the dynamics of Middle Eastern patronage.

With the opening of a satellite campus of Somerset Lucknow University just outside the town of Kanafeh (which offers programs in Computer Science, Accounting and the Fine Arts), the area is quickly assuming a hipster desert caché. Currado, always alert to unusual opportunities is happy to be one of the first on board. And while most would balk, seeing only political instability and unsettling flux, Currado see's it raining dinars, dirhams and qirsh.

He's even learning how to snorkel! 

THE MOVEMENT TO TRADEMARK THE WORD "FRENCH"

Self-congratulation is a universal vice but no one exceeds the Americans in their inflated sense of self.

So claims my good friend Currado Malaspina, a man known for his blunt candor and blanket generalizations. He was visiting the U.S. recently, taking part in a three-day conference called "Clarion Toward the Future." Held on the campus of Jack Feld Christian College in Savannah, Georgia, this broad-brushed symposium of writers, athletes, artists and mental health executives presented panels and forums where leaders in their fields could expostulate on the present and prognosticate on the future.

There is no atmosphere so electric as one where pessimism and hope mingle like dinner guests desperate for a ride home. Insights and ideas circulated like second-hand smoke as the conferees hopscotched from meeting to meeting to redundant meeting.

Currado presented a sound and light Powerpoint presentation on the recurring theme of the Madonna in western culture. From Duccio di Buonisegna to Lady Gaga, Malaspina breathlessly touched on a myriad of unrelated themes and stunned the assembled crowd with an off-key rendering of Material Girl while accompanying himself on a toy accordion.

Strangely enough, the strongest impression he received revolved around diet and nutrition. "Americans," he told me, "love their food dripping in oil. They spend lavishly on sneakers, golf clubs and mobile phones yet skimp on something so simple as oil. They incessantly fry most of their under-seasoned, over-cooked foods in something vaguely resembling huile moteur. They have even audaciously renamed les frites as if to flippantly absolve themselves of their heedless, criminal, culinary irresponsibility."

And Currado ... what about your own melodic malfeasance!??

Cio che era pagano ora è l'emblema della cristianità

One man's rummage is another man's jewel. What seems flighty to some may be weighty and thoughtful to others. Brainy is in the eye of the beholder.

These are the tenets of a uniquely American understanding of culture. It is a democratic, pluralistic, utopian view. It is also extremely destructive. 

Or so is the opinion of Vengalu Ophir, dean of the French Institute of Higher Learning in Paris' affluent 6th arrondissement.

Portrait of Professor Vengalu Ophir, conté crayon on vellum, Currado Malaspina, 2010

 Ophir, now well into his eighties, has been for many years, a mentor to my good friend Currado Malaspina. He is universally esteemed as an uncompromising scholar whose principled approach to learning has served as a beacon to an entire generation of artists and academics.

His book on Marsilio Ficino Les âmes rationnelles repentir (Éditions Tacheur, 1979) remains to this day the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the great early Renaissance humanist.

Ophir is known for his virulent disdain for almost everything American. From speed dating to fast food, reality television, paper cups, Halloween, the Huffington Post, baseball, Costco, frozen vegetables, the eminent professor finds it all extremely dégoutant. 

However there is one venerable exception.

Forty years ago, Currado Malaspina managed to persuade the notoriously inflexible pedant to accompany him to a concert by a famous American rock band. In addition to it being loud, the performance was incorrigibly vulger, yet the music was unexpectedly complex. 

And so to this day, The Mothers of Invention remain the anomalous aberration, the grudging exception for France's most petulant aesthete.

A NEVER-QUENCHING REQUIEM

It's already an acknowledged fact, one that has already entered into the ranks of rank platitudes, that the forces of technology and popular culture have wrung the resinous glow of language's lyric potential into a tripe-heap of transactional clichés.

Take for example the fetid phrase "bucket list," an image that sooner evokes the daily droppings of a dairy farm than the ominous epiphanies of near-death. My good friend Currado Malaspina, from the safety of his Rue Pinel atalier in the 13th arrondissment, has the proper perch upon which to comment on our pre-mortem follies. He has suggested a more poignant list, one with a pressing agenda of greater cosmological urgency.

Currado's Dream of Heaven

Currado has suggested that we begin to compile a "post-bucket" list, an afterlife agenda with plans that exceed the temporal trendiness of skydiving and cruises to Antarctica. He imagines a list of demands and complaints that one might present to a committee of deities. He dreams of meeting the expired artists of antiquity, the poets, dead and damned and luminaries like Napoleon, Tallyrand, Mendès France and Madame Curie. 

He wants to fly saddleless on Pegasus or on a sun-chariot á grande vitesse or even in the unlikely event that such creatures exist, on the fluffy white wings of beatified angels.  

As for his immediate present, while tranquil drafts of oxygen still flow frictionless through his nicotine-stained windpipe, Malaspina is happy to eat rich foods, make love, drink wine and pierce our fragile complaisance with works of art of celestial and blissful beauty.

Palimpseste Trente-Deux, Currado Malaspina, 2012

UNETHICAL FATHER FIGURES

Faceless, nameless anonymous sex. Exchanging partners like changing socks. A dissipated life full of momentary gratification but little happiness. A world of wealth but a poverty of well-being. Suffering in the classic sense. A man defeated by his own fame, carried off by the ether of his uncomfortable acclaim.

Such is the myth surrounding my friend Currado Malaspina.

Is it a self-inflicted wound or a carefully orchestrated campaign of marketable misinformation? I know the man well and I confess that I too am unsure.

It is true that Currado has the oily temperament of an unrepentant roué but it is equally true that his business acumen is as sharp as his wit and that he suffers none of the scruples that hinder his moderately ethical peers.

The French are a forgiving lot and so my friend Malaspina has had to set the transgressive window toward the highest rafters of raffishness. His sins are those of a Sardenopolus and the hurts that he has inflicted upon his fellow man (and fellow-woman) have been biblical in scale and diabolical in scope.

And yet, the French eat it all up like a giant stinky wheel of fresh brie. His celebrity and notoriety rival the worst of the American rappers and make your average Russian oligarch look like Albert Schweitzer.

As the French cultural historian Professor Ayn Analie-Meelee wryly pointed out not too long ago in a piece in Paris Hier, "If not him, whom? If not now, when?" (Si ce n'est pas lui, qui? Si ce n'est pas maintenant, quand?). She went on to explain that what seemed unconscionable in the recent past is practically de rigueur today. She claims that in the arts we are in an end of history moment (un épisode du fin de l'histoire) where ideas are merely synopses of narcissism (synopsis du narcissisme) and the formerly menacing cults of personality are now the stuff of quaint trending topics of Twitter.

To be on top one must remain on top and in Currado's case this means a ragged course of constant self-debasement and a relentless supply of oxygen for the engines of infantile public curiosity. 

But for the love of Mike, what the heck is a "synopsis of narcissism??"





 

THE DRY WHIP OF EMPTY FAME

The true measure of emptiness in this heedless age of bleating self-promotion may very well be the 'tweet'. A besotted pendulum sways not with dependable rhythms but with the faithless currents of sexless infatuation. Images and ideas no longer have currency outside the empty aura we appropriately call the"viral."

My dear friend Currado Malaspina is a lonely man dwelling in the past. He no longer knows what to make of all this 'new media'.

He recently found the following on the internet while doing an innocent search for 19th century Celtic limericks: 

Alas, the private life of contemplation is no longer available to him. He now glows vermilion as a ubiquitous presence on social media. After so many years laboring at his craft he has been pitifully reduced to the condition of a cute kitten yawning into a pillow.

Dada is now officially dead. 

BEKAA BECKONS

My good friend Currado Malaspina never leaves his atelier without his Lica V-Lux 30 digital camera and his Schmincke half-pan watercolors. This is especially true during his annual August vacation where he typically takes over 10,000 pictures and fills about two dozen sketchbooks.

Somewhat out of character, Currado decided to spend 15 days at a resort hotel in Sharm el Sheikh.

Poolside at the Kulliyat-e-Hasrat Desert Resort and Casino, Currado Malaspina, 2013

The southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula with its infernal summer heat is not everyone's idea of an ideal location but Currado, always alert to a good bargain jumped at the cut-rate deals. The recent Egyptian coup d'état and the ensuing political uncertainty has seriously impacted the holiday traffic. It seems that Malaspina has had the Kulliyat-e-Hasrat Desert Resort and Casino practically to himself. Aside from the odd south Asian businessman and Gulf State itinerant gambler, the hotel is nearly empty.

Анжелика, Лидия and Светлана, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Apparently the only women at the hotel are a trio of young seminarians from St. Petersburg and a comely young widow from Lebanon who according to Currado, never takes off her large, floppy pink hat.

Zaina wading, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Currado is already talking about buying a new, Fujinon wide-angle 16x zoom lens and although he doesn't ski, I believe he plans on spending next Christmas in Laqlouq.

Zaida afloat, Currado Malaspina, 2013

INCOMPETENT OR OUT OF ELEMENT?

In Currado Malaspina's native France and within the stridulous intellectual milieu in which he uneasily resides, the deep dark fissure between the lofty heights of "fine art" and the purgatorially compromised world of the "commercial" is an unreconciled and irreconcilable breach. In the face of numberless entreaties and innumerable requests my principled friend has never descended into the mercenary world of advertising and illustration. He has always stubbornly clung to the traditional idea of le peintre in that profoundly European way.

At least that has been the case until he began treatment for an enlarged prostate. Between the cracks of les urgences and les médecins généralistes, Currado's aggressive and experimental treatments are not fully covered by La Sécurité Sociale. His mounting medical bills have been putting a profound strain upon his modest fortunes. His prudish imperturbability, by the sheer force of desperate necessity, has moved Currado into the previously uncharted world of retailing his talents.

Commissioned by Presse Pousse to supply an original image for Gilles Grancrâne new novel The Fetid Field (Le Champ Fétide), Currado reluctantly hired a private tutor and learned how to use Photoshop. Inevitably drawn to the traditional flaws of human handiwork, he insisted on incorporating a painterly rendering to go with the glitzy computer generated image.

And so here is an original Malaspina rendition of the traditional author's slipcase portrait.

Gilles Grancrâne from Le Champs Fétide, Currado Malaspina, 2013 (Courtesy of Presse Pousse)

Rumor has it that Grancrâne is apoplectic with what may very well be a wholly justified and understandable rage.

My dear Currado - please get well soon!

RANDOM NOTES

"The day artists begin to forgive each others' transgressions, when they lapse into amicable, mutual assent and grant each other easy amnesty will be the day the culture descends into its ultimate twitch of justifiable death."

My dear friend Currado Malaspina, embroiled in an insalubrious romance with a young woman half his age, is cavorting with his new companion this summer in over-priced spas and resorts throughout the State of California. I don't expect to see him but from time to time he drops me a note.

The aforementioned edict arrived the other day in an old fashioned manilla envelope and was part a larger, longer manifesto. I suppose he has time on his hands despite the hefty demands of his lovely callow concubine.

Included as well was this odd cartoon inartfully scrawled on a small sheet of hotel stationary.

Could any of these facts be somehow related?

Le maître donne les devoirs aux élèves

My good friend Currado Malaspina recently attended his 40th high school reunion (yes, they indulge in such idiocies in France as well). He was struck, as many are in such circumstances, at how dramatically, or perhaps to be more precise, how suddenly people had aged. Seeing his former comrades from the lycée, it occurred to Currado that back then he never suspected that their much discussed future potential included such indignities as adulthood, much less impending old age. He distinctly remembers taking for granted the permanence of his physical bearing. Everything will remain the same, he remembers thinking, everything except one's oppressive tethering to one's parents

And it was there among his aging friends that mortality ceased being mere artifice, a device lending requisite yet illegitimate gravitas to a life, and started asserting itself instead as a real, inconvenient and terrifying fact.

Young Currado Malaspina 1973

In France, it could be said that the professional designation 'peintre' carries little of the bewildering stigma it bears here in the States. Currado was therefore greeted by his former comrades not with the rakish, wayward brow of condescension but rather with a bemused, almost bored nonchalance. In fact, the Lycée Mesrine class of 1973 boasted a few illustrious and unconventional citizens of the Republic. The flamboyant philosopher Simon Raphael Cohen and the jazz pianist Konrad Beauvence are just two names that come readily to mind. 

The assembly was addressed by class of '72, former Minister of Transportation and Export Louis-Philippe de Gorney, known mostly as a tireless champion of the Razor-Scooter, Vélib' bike-rentals and the 35-hour work week. He spoke mostly about what he called "the jagged intersection of charity and vengeance" and the significance of the Mesrine legacy. Currado wryly noted how fitting it was for the erstwhile government official to be looking for intersections.

They later met for coffee where they floated the idea of joining their talents and starting an NGO devoted to promoting the health benefits of walking.

The big surprise came when de Gorney reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a tattered, brittle piece of lined paper folded neatly in quarters. "Vous souvenez-vous cette"? he asked a stunned Currado. 

Indeed, Malaspina remembered it well.

from a high school notebook of Currado Malaspina circa 1971

EVERYTHING WHICH ARISES IS WORTHY OF PERISHING

 When he reached the age of fifty my good friend Currado Malaspina entered the swelling ranks of the nearly content. Unattained aspirations, unrequited fantasies and unrealized goals were suddenly foregrounded as his own background began to recede. He developed an unhealthy habit of counting in his head his former mistresses, lovers and wives. He began his daydreams with the phrase "what if" and revived old grudges with reveries of revenge. He became a man immersed in a past buried within an irretrievable web of circumstances and missed opportunities. 

To Currado the present became increasingly remote while he suddenly became effectively impotent.

Thus began the La Décennie Noire, Currado's dark decade of inactivity and depression.

Currado at the seaside sanatorium Sihirli Dağ, Izmir, Turkey 2005

Or so reads the conventional rendering of my good friend's mid-career creative impasse. The truth, as is typical in such cases, is much more nuanced. 

Rilke observed that "works of art are always the result of one's having been in danger," and so it was with Malaspina. Experiencing a profound decline in his formally robust libido, Currado began consulting with a battery of doctors, therapists, healers and hypnotists. Each one made the same sober evaluation. 

Currado was getting old.

Finding this unacceptable my resourceful friend found succor from a reliably familiar source - the brazenly naked, deliciously fluid, erotically charged commotion of human flesh in flux. With his ample resources Currado hired actresses and dancers, acrobats and hookers, weightlifters and bus drivers, women, men, young, old, anyone who would take their clothes off for him and pose.

The result was "Ten-Thousand Figures," a vast, Olympian act of voluptuary reclamation.

Detail from Dix-Mille Nus, 2001 - 2011, Currado Malaspina

   
The success of this enterprise is a matter of some dispute. Currado claims his legendary vigor returned within weeks. Others suggest that Malaspina became deeply disturbed at his burgeoning bisexuality. There are even a few skeptics who insist that the whole thing was one big public relations hoax.

One thing remains certain. As Currado enters his seventh decade, an age where one should find at least some small measure of sagacity and fulfillment, muddling insecurity remains the prevailing leitmotif for this overgrown adolescent genius.

LES CAHIERS DU PALIMPSESTE

I have heard from many quarters that Currado Malaspina's Palimpsest notebooks are based on a perversion.

To some people it's a perversion of faith, to others a perversion of fact but all of Currado's detractors agree that les Cahiers du Palimpseste are a corrupted, premeditated, ignominious sacrilege. 

 From sources both liturgical and cabalistic, my militantly laical colleague has turned the genuinely sacred into a soup of Daedalean banality. After mastering post-biblical Hebraic orthography (a skill not commonly shared among most Diasporic Jews let alone French Roman Catholics), Currado has filled dozens of notebooks with fragments as well as extended excerpts from the medieval verse of Ibn Gabirol, the Lurianic speculations of Hayyim Vital and Shalom Sharabi as well as the more contemporary metaphysical poetry of the Toronto based Itai Hoki-Kerach. 

The reaction has been fast and fierce.

The associate chief rabbi of Kehilat Iris in
Auvers-sur-Oise called on Currado to justify his seemingly arbitrary use of apocrypha and prayer. René Maigrichon, past president of the Conseil des Institution des Juives Croyants went so far as to publish an open letter of protest in the weekly news magazine Le Vieux Typographe.

Even the legendary Belgian pop idol Isaak Guitara whose latest release featured several controversially explicit Ladino love songs called Malaspina "unjustifiably provocative."

Ironically in Israel, the religious establishment remains fairly nonplussed. "If all this gets people to take a second look at the Maharal then what's the harm?" said Jerusalem seminarian Yossele Scharf whose view seems to represent the holy land's pious mainstream.

And I suppose, on the other hand, that if it gets the haredi (ultra-orthodox) community a little closer to Art Basel, documenta and the Venice Biennale,  well, that can't be a bad thing either.

HASTEN THE MERRY MAILMAN

It's always a treat receiving a letter from my dear friend Currado Malaspina. The epistolary tradition is a withering flame, a weak fragile rump from a faded past whose futile inefficiencies are ill suited to our hyper-utilitarian age. The illuminated missive is a rarer bird still and I credit Currado's stubborn persistence in maintaining this form of expression. For this alone I look forward to his every note.

His awkward drawings with their unembarrassed intimacies are nothing but refined, visual versions of the boastful bombasts one finds among contemporary rappers. Typically, his renderings depict some unlikely sexual conquest by some self-satisfied protagonist whose appetites range from the illicit to the bizarre. 

The letters themselves are usually full of rich gleeful anecdotes, bitter ruminations and detailed analyses of the French medical establishment as seen through the prism of his own unfortunate ailments. 

I recently received a long note written on what looked like the kind of paper placemat one finds in Greek diners in Jersey. The paper had that faint wavy tooth running evenly throughout - the kind of surface that vainly attempts to grant some small degree of gravitas to the cheeseburger, the iceberg lettuce/lone tomato salad and the bottomless cup of coffee. (I even think there was a small gravy stain blotting the corner, but that could have been watercolor). 

The letter contained a manifesto of sorts. It was a rambling exhortation defending the resurgent use of the Mesmer baquet in certain remote convents in Brittany. He claims that it has cured him of gout and that it alone restored his esophageal motility. (Perhaps the placemat had some talismanic significance). 

I believe my good friend has lost his mind which is very bad news for him but great news for us!

I love these strange new screeds.

ACCOUNTING

A wet glittering sun sizzles upon the gravel road that leads to Currado Malaspina's summer studio in Languedoc-Roussillon. Situated about three kilometers west of the huge salt-water swamp of Camargue, it is not unusual to spot one of the many beautiful cliff birds that are indigenous to the area.

The garden behind Currado Malaspina's Languedoc-Roussillon studio. 2013

For Currado, summer begins in April and ends sometime in late June when he cedes his little portion of paradise to foreign tourists, typically Germans, ready to spend upwards of €1500 a week for the privilege of renting his cozy two bedroom cottage.

Till then, he spends his time reading the Georgics, grilling gamey meats and painting small, insignificant watercolors on scraps of discarded drawing paper.

Untitled watercolor, Currado Malaspina, 2013

For my good friend Currado, the season is one glorious, languorous, unending day. His pictures, usually no larger than the size of a man's palm, command in the rancorous Parisian art market the decidedly immodest sum of €7500.

For my good friend Currado Malaspina, profit is never poisoned by the brunt of onerous exertion.