POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN

My good friend Currado Malaspina has an uneasy relationship with nature. His indifference to plants, oceans and animals is not uncommon among the European intelligentsia. No less of an authority than Jean-Paul Sartre famously described trees as "des obstacles gênants à une pensée claire."*

It is therefore nothing less than astonishing that Malaspina has been spending the past year and a half making plein-air watercolors.

A radical departure from his normal practice, these small trifles, produced in situ, are redolent with the detestable vapors of academic revisionism. 

Landscape, André Derain, 1930

This is no small matter.

Nowhere is the pernicious agon between progression and retrogression more tethered to Fascism than in France. One need only look at the questionable career of André Derain to find evidence for this uncomfortable yet valuable assertion.

Currado cries foul and claims an artful innocence when confronted with these facts but unlike the art world in the United States, in France ideas still matter.

"Sincerity is the comfort of infants and fools ."  

This oft quoted line from the Australian poet K. C. Stengel's epic Always Last, has been evoked as an apologia for artists' behavior from Danton to Dubuffet. But what's forgotten about this modern master of terza rima is that he was above all else a satirist and it is precisely the lack of irony that makes Malaspina's new work so insidious.

The critics are having none of it and Currado has been roundly condemned from every corner. 

It would be fitting to cite Stengel's quatrain in full for it is context that provides a deeper reading of his unusual ideas:

Gone are the nights of stories and tales
Sincerity is the comfort of infants and fools
Echos of lies lie deep in the shales
Smothered by mothers and brothers and schools.

 from Always Last, K. C. Stengel 

*Cumbersome obstacles to clear thinking

      

The Bodhisattva of la Rue de la Bûcherie

Professional art training is a much different affair in France than it is in the United States. With very little value placed on advanced degrees or university affiliations artists tend to work much more independently than they do, say, in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. The approach in Paris is much more liberal, freer and less tethered to the academy, be it of the traditional variety or, as Robert Hughes put it, "the academy of the avant-garde."

My friend Currado Malaspina is the perfect example of this systemless system of art education. He has availed himself of the grand legacy of French painting but he is neither stifled by it nor feels compelled to repudiate or condemn it. His is the Middle Way, the method of an artist comfortable in their artistic skin. Whatever aesthetic innovations are stumbled upon he accepts with the grace of the fortunate rather than as the spoils of the aggrieved.

 

Palimpseste I no. 16, Currado Malaspina, 2012

One could argue that with the absence of an anxiety of influence Malaspina is condemned to an oeuvre that simmers beneath the boil but that would presume that he is a naïf. There's a cunning side of Currado, a side that misdirects as it lures the inattentive eye into a maelstrom of subversion.

Whether Currado is just a dabbling journeyman or an apostle of some new disruption still remains to be seen. What is certain is that as a character he is sui generis, a man untainted by trend and untouched by any prevailing taste.

Hélas, could he be one of the last authentic egghead savants?