OF GODS, CAREERS AND MEN

As life trudges on, a thoughtful man facing the nakedness of his inevitable mortality, takes a sanguine measure of himself and his history and sighs.  My good friend Currado Malaspina is no exception though the turn he has taken of late is rather astonishing, to say the least.

French leftist intellectuals are not really known for their piety outside of politics. The staunch creed of laïcité is the one guiding principle that unites this class of calculated bavardeurs. Such was the case with Currado as well - at least for the first forty years of his career.

His return to the Catholicism of his youth was an unanticipated pivot toward a complicated past redolent in the coarse conditional love, personal sacrifice and inflexible certainty of the French peasant family and creed.

  

That this comes with an acrid air of mild xenophobia should come as no surprise. Roots run deeply in Provence and it was to Gareoult near the
Louis Cauvin necropolis where Malaspina has found his refuge. What Bellow called 'potato love' the French call le confort de camembert, and there are few things more primitively soothing.

Currado's devoted public has grown complacently accustomed to his predictable diction as an unapologetic épateur.  Some are dubious of this recent turn of events for he has made several strategic shifts like this throughout the years. 

Time will tell how the critics, curators and collectors react.

It's all in the hands of God.

Épateur le divinité, Currado Malaspina, watercolor, 2006