TRACTATUS FURIOSOS

While the reveries of most rational men dissolve into the ash of bitter experience my good friend Currado Malaspina continues live in a state of hopeful anticipation. The shale and bog of middle age have yet to dampen his fanciful dreams. Though fame has always been within his easy reach, success or the kind of success that Currado finds meaningful has not.

His eccentric notebooks are full of the jottings of a madman. Incoherent scrawls in a motley tapestry of crude miscellany allude in a host of languages to lost opportunities, abandoned plans and bitter jeremiads against named and unnamed adversaries alike. He seems to have forgotten nothing and what may appear insignificant to others loom in the foreground of Malaspina's imagination like a limestone cenotaph.

 

But through it all there's a strong thread of buoyant optimism within the pages of his frazzled pads. Encoded in his private dialect are cheerful predictions of personal progress and renovation. Atonement seems to be the most dominant trope and a self-effacing melancholy is braided through his boasts like the verses in a villanelle.

That he has agreed to have his journals published in not surprising in a man whose life has been one of public indiscretion. What has surprised the critics is that he has agreed to have the work edited and annotated by the inscrutably thorough but far from disinterested art historian Orestia Shestov.

It is not unlikely that through it all we may learn the truth behind their tangled tryst of many years ago. Perhaps therein lies the source of Currado's unlikely optimism.  

THANKS FOR SHARING

Some might charitably call it the kinky seams of apprenticeship others would discard it entirely as artistically irrelevant but there's one glorious fact upon which everyone agrees: The early work of Currado Malaspina is at long last a scalding, bullish commodity.

Les serments et des lettres #3, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

For over thirty years my good friend Currado has been warehousing reams of his juvenilia in a nondescript storage facility in Nantes. Unbeknownst to just about everyone (including myself), about 50 kilometers from his summer home in Pornic a gold mine lay in abeyance, waiting like a lost key to reveal its forgotten virtue.

Les serments et des lettres #12, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

The staggering self-confidence of the young Malaspina is something unfathomable in today's atmosphere of intellectually abnegating social score-keeping. 

From Facebook to LinkedIn, the inflated contemporary narratives of our half cooked professional classes are a living testament to our chronic insecurities. Every minor episode of our pathetic little lives is now duly recorded and promiscuously chronicled as if to say "here are my fears which are touchingly concealed behind the tattered veil of fictitious triumph." Is an anthropomorphic pet or an over-priced poorly prepared meal truly a significant sign of personal achievement?

 Seen in this light, the subdued and gradual nurturing of Currado's gifts appear nothing short of visionary. Abjuring even the reflected light of fame, my dear friend labored silently until the furrows of imperfection began to align and his unique conceptual armature bolted itself to actual, living works.

His ethic is a relic but his market value is as real as a treasury note. 

And now that Currado is finally flush he has even found time to play with his kitten.

 

ART HISTORY - RESET

A small scandal is underfoot. 

The creation myth surrounding Currado Malaspina's internationally acclaimed Palimpseste series is facing a serious challenge from, of all places, the Persian Gulf. 

Palimpseste #3, Currado Malaspina 2012

These familiar images have come to be associated with the very idea of Currado Malaspina. For lack of a more dignified term, it has become, to a large measure, his 'brand.' Despite the intricacies of his highly developed yet personal cosmology, the obscure nature of his far flung hermeneutics and the eloquent expertise of his obsessive yet lyrical execution, the works themselves have become, like Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Carpentier's Song of Degrees, a mere humdrum, misunderstood facsimile and a self-replicating unit of popular cultural significance or put another way, a celebrity.

The plot has now taken an unexpected geopolitical twist with the emergent claims of the hitherto unknown Persian artist, Müshil Mehemrodrageh.

Like many Americans, the French carry a cloying colonial

Müshil Mehemrodrageh

prejudice that claims that only the West is capable of serious artistic innovation. The idea that the Iran of the ayatollahs could produce a painter of merit within its own borders, working within its own institutions is about as likely as finding a decent slice of pizza in Jakarta or a croissant au beurre in Minsk.

And yet, the Teheran-based Müshil Mehemrodrageh has not only been producing a steady stream of sophisticated pictures for the past thirty-five years but he may also be the rightful and legitamite progenitor of Malaspina's alleged chef d'oeuvre Palimpseste. Reviewing the evidence, the conclusion of many specialists, critics and diplomats is both disturbing and rather damning. 

Bildar no. 4, Oil on linen, Müshil Mehemrodrageh 1980 (courtesy of the artist)

The recent tempest surrounding these works has even eclipsed the nuclear issue, at least for the moment. The renewed claims of Persian cultural supremacy have once again taken center stage. The ire against the French has been so caustic that the Iranians are considering ignoring Francois Hollande's offer of relaxing economic sanctions.

"Keep your goose liver and your smelly cheeses," deputy foreign minister Omar Boabache recently said at a particularly bellicose news conference, "between Russia, Turkey and Japan we're doing just fine without all your effeminate exports! Say goodbye to our fancy rugs and delicious pistachio ice-cream not to mention our oil. You can faire le bise my ass mes amis!!!"

I heard that Mehemrodrageh recently hired someone to taste his food and check under his car for funny looking balloons.

I guess even paranoids have enemies.

 

COMMITMENT

Things are looking up for my good friend Currado Malaspina.

The tentative rapprochement with his erstwhile collaborator Dahlia Danton now looks, on the surface, like a fait accompli.  

They have put their aesthetic differences behind them (at least for now) and have decided to resume their artistic collaboration (albeit on a trial basis).

As most of my readers remember, together with the likes of Komar and Melamid, Gilbert and George, Harvin and Fitzsimmons and the Starn Twins, Danton & Malaspina were a fixture in the late 20th century Creative Couplet Movement.

As reported by veteran arts pundit Sergei Sergie in the culture blog Rough Toast, the pair were informally invited to submit a proposal to the forthcoming aRCHIVE (13) exhibition tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2015. 

Few people have forgotten their politically charged pieces from aRCHIVE (12). Casting the leaders of the G8 nations as protagonists in pet portraits, Danton & Malaspina challenged the whole notion of sovereignty, global resources and the so-called war on terror.

Like many simpleminded tendentious works of art, it created a burlesque atmosphere of scandal and recrimination.

Puppy, Danton & Malaspina, 2011

If not for the deft damage control by the two chief curators, Jimmy De Stantio and Marta Castelammuffito the exhibition might have been shut down. The publicity was fantastic but neither Malaspina nor Danton could handle the tumultuous aftermath. They cracked under the strain and ended their partnership amid mutually acrimonious accusations of aesthetic betrayal and commercial capitulation.

Though Danton thrived as a solo act (she has representation in three different cities including Foucault/Hurston in New York), Currado never seemed to recover (he is currently teaching).

I suppose it's just a matter of temperament.