CURRADO WHO?

My good friend Currado Malaspina has reached the tender age where his retrospective eye is no longer jaundiced by regret and his prognosticating eye is no longer fouled by expectation.

He has reached the age of sanguinity.

He has a lovely girl-friend with whom he shares a gentle intimacy, he has a brilliant editor with whom he has a deep and abiding friendship and he has a temperamental wife in whom he has a reliably nimble adversary. 

In other words, like many artists before him he is leading what the French call la vie bohème en rupture.

As he withdraws into the predictability of habit and the near abjuration of conspicuous vice his work has taken a decided turn toward the staid, the complacent and, dare I say, the priggish. Where once he courted scandal, it is more common these days for Currado to take comfort in consensus and conformity. His induction into the august Société des grands maîtres de la république is only the most recent case in point. For the most part he seems to spend his time reading Le Monde Diplomatique, playing pétanque in Parc André Citroën with a few chain-smoking retirees and drawing the live model on Thursday nights at Ateliers Rrose Selavy in the 9ème.

The legend of Malaspina, a convenient fabrication crafted like a fine watch and nurtured like a vine has finally fallen into disuse. In this, our viral age, it's slow obsolescence has barely been noticed. The only things that seem to remain are the scars, the stories and the work.

To those still sympathetic to this mediocre man ...
pick two.

 

 

TEETH

"The skin on my face is beginning to look like a shoe in need of a shine."

My dear, vain friend Currado Malaspina is beginning to recognize the ravages of aging.

He's conflicted.

On the one hand he sees the years that lay behind him as a necessary apprenticeship. He looks at his youth as an inventory of embarrassments the fruits of which are the accessible insights he enjoys in retrospection.

On the other hand he wakes each morning to swollen ankles, sour breath and a hulking conscience larded with regrets.

I suppose one could call it "mood swings" but he just calls it fretful inertia.

Luckily. during the heady late 20th century when in the eyes of the art-buying public he could do no wrong, he packed away his euro like a beaver collecting river grass. He bought a nice place just outside Moncontour, a small villa surrounded by lush cypresses, agapanthes, crocosmias, echinaceas and wild jasmine.

It helps to dull the pain but the conflict remains like a cold-sore.

He still sells the occasional painting but he knows that he's only trading in the conceptual retreads of an old artist in decline.

Could it be that he's poised to fall in love yet again? Will he be consumed by the torments of another young muse? Will his creativity surge while being devoured and disfigured by another vagina dentata?

Probably.

THE PAST SUBJECTIVE

For an artist deeply involved in his work, the walls of Currado Malaspina's studio are strangely bare . An outdated calendar fixed on février with a reproduction of  La Fornarina is hanging at a careless angle by the slop-sink in the back. Next to it is a postcard - its provenance long forgotten - with a short ambivalent message scrawled in what could be a child's hand that cryptically reads "nous sommes arrivés."

At the far wall, near the mammoth Saint Remy mahogany easel are a cluster of thumbtacks, the flat-headed kind that have long since been replaced in most art supply stores by the ubiquitous pushpin. It's probably a reflection of the times that the soft clumsy thumb has given way to the belligerent, "user friendly" push.  It's equally significant  that the querulous Currado has remained impervious to this benign technological disruption.

By his small desk which curiously sits in the one windowless corner of the room, there's a faded color snapshot of a smartly dressed woman of early middle age walking briskly from what appears to be a 1964 Chevrolet Impala. The picture seems to have been taken in the early spring somewhere on the east coast of the United States, but of this I can't be sure.

It never crossed my mind to ask Currado about this diminutive memento, assuming its private significance would lose a layer of intimacy in either the explaining or the evasion. But through the years I've noticed that the picture is degrading almost like an organism. It's as if it has taken on the talismanic role of gauging Malaspina's own physical and mental deterioration. 

Currado doesn't believe in regret despite the fact that his life is a noxious trail of slights and sins. His old friend Dahlia Danton (who never met a cliché she hasn't worn out like a terrycloth bathrobe) likes to say that "you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube." 

Currado would prefer gum disease. 

The rest of the 500 square meter space is as barren as the old testament Sarah. Malaspina has scrubbed his present of the past, turning his diminishing future into an unfettered conjecture.

He likes it that way for in his own eyes he's blameless and free from accountability.

But who is the woman with the Impala and to where exactly have the mysterious children arrived?