THE BITTER FURIES OF CURRADO MALASPINA

MALASPINA INFOMERCIAL

2012-02-03T12:40:00.000-08:00

My odd ailing friend Currado Malaspina frequently admonished me for what he discerned as a luxurious ambivalence to commerce (or in his words "une ambivalence princière pour le bénéfice"). He claimed I had a patronizing disdain for the economic realities of the artworld and dismissively called me "uno fantasticatore" - a dreamer.

Perhaps.

And yet, in this last bit of self-promotion, I believe Currado Malaspina has gone a bit too far.

CHI ME L'HA FATTO FARE???

2012-01-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

"How did I get myself roped into this?!"

The normally mellifluent voice of Eulalia Capillas was inflected with rage. She had just found out what everyone west of the Loire already knew. Currado Malaspina had published the Aquarelle Noirci - the fifteen notorious watercolors depicting what he calls "la béatitude de l'esclavage et la soumission."

L'Origine du Monde, Currado Malaspina 2003

As works of art, they are at best rather weak, but as a document of a louche look back at a more fervid, frenzied time in his life, these small pictures are nothing short of monumental. As most of my readers know, in the not too distant past my good friend Currado Malaspina collected mistresses and concubines with an avidity bordering on manic. To those who believe in a vengeful God, his current physical ailments and limitations would represent a fitting comeuppance. The Auquarelle Noirci seem to serve as a surrogate for a more corporeal fulfillment and as such deserve our indulgence if not our outright forgiveness.

Eulalia Capillas understandingly feels otherwise.

In the English language edition of this wonderfully designed folio (Salone Nuovo Press, Boston), Currado included half a dozen photographs that are both directly and indirectly connected to the drawings.

I suppose the one below hit a nerve.

Eulalia étendu, Currado Malaspina, 2002

HUMANISM AND LARCENY

2011-12-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

Lorenzo Valla, a thorough and intrepid researcher for L'Osservatore Romano has blown the lid off Currado Malaspina's recent exhibition, Palimpsest. Although he viewed the show rather favorably, he noted that much of the work bore a striking resemblance to documents and manuscripts from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

One example comes from what scholars call the "Thomas Moore Talmud."

Palimpsest #988, Currado Malaspina

Take a look above at Palimpsest # 988. Small script obscuring floating figures is a pictoral strategy used to great effect in Currado's work. Dating back to his famous early series "The Secret Growth of Doves," Malaspina has incorporated texts of dubious provenance in much of his works-on-paper. The introduction of conspicuously unobstructed nudes is something new that begins to appear in the Palimpsest pieces.

Valla's discovery is the previously unknown Tractate X. This incredibly beautiful 17th century fragment from the Thomas Moore Talmud is so similar to Malaspina in style as well as substance, it is hard not to conclude that he savagely appropriated a pre-existing image. Surely he hoped - unjustifiably it turns out - that no one would notice.

Grazie Lorenzo!!

Tractate X from the Thomas Moore Talmud, 1679

EGO MICHI NON PLACEO

2011-12-15T21:59:00.000-08:00

The Palimpsest series is a group of close to 1700 drawings that were produced between May 1996 and September 1997 when my friend Currado Malaspina was recovering from a near fatal diving accident.

The works which are all meticulously constructed through an intricate process of layering, burying, scraping, resurrecting, redrawing, revising, sublimating, surfacing, gouging and excavating are relatively weak when seen individually. After all, the work was grounded in a mindless though necessary process of physical and mental rehabilitation. They were more like heroic attempts by Currado to regain his ability to walk, feed himself, think cogently and go to the bathroom with dignity.

Palimpsest #1326, Currado Malaspina 1997

The drawings have recently been assembled - no small feat in light of the fact that they have been dispersed for over a decade among countless private collections and about a dozen museums. The credit goes to Francesco di Marco Datini, chief curator of drawing and prints at the Obscurum Phantasiae Nationali in Turin. He single-handedly secured the loans of over 1500 on the works and the impact of seeing all these images at once is truly staggering.

Currado was visibly moved at his opening. It was the first time I have seen him humbled, gracious and self-effacing. As we parted company I kissed him on both cheeks. He held me for a few extra uncomfortable seconds, long enough to whisper in my ear:

"I don't like myself."

Charisma? .... I don't see it ...

2011-12-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

Aardashini Tasawwuf, the devastatingly beautiful actress and fashion model has been a permanent fixture at the Malaspina atelier for the past several months. How this withered, decrepit Frenchman attracts such gorgeous women into his circle of admirers is beyond comprehension.


Aardashini Tasawwuf on the set of Leopards, Cricket and the Lost Ring of Tabir, 2011

She was with him at the opening of his most recent exhibition, Maquettes pour le Marquis at Gallerie Claude Pierre-Or on rue Galilée.

Aardashini Tasawwuf at the opening of Maquettes pour le Maquis, Paris

And he was with her in Kolkata where she was working on the forthcoming Tagore Production feature Leopards, Cricket and the Lost Ring of Tabir.

Aardashini Tasawwuf in her dressing room

Malaspina was even able to cajole her agent into allowing her to appear in his latest video, which as a result, went viral on YouTube India.

You go figure ...

Forgotten French Painter

2011-11-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

You don't want my brutal colleague Currado Malaspina to be your adversary. Know in advance that if you are a painter, he will never be your friend. The best you can hope for is to cultivate his ambivalence - but then again, that would mean you are not even worthy of his enmity.

One notable exception was Francis X. Olivier.


Préparer à une Chirurgie, oil on canvas, Francis X. Olivier 1965

Currado absolutely loved Olivier. To Malaspina he was a mentor, a confidante, a protector and a father confessor. Malaspina was completely devoted to the older painter. Olivier had his share of detractors. Many considered him a half-baked, second generation abstract expressionist. Others called him an "américaine manqué."

And those were were the ones who are considered charitable.

And yet, he was an extremely popular and successful French artist. At his death in 1989 his work could command at auction a healthy five figures. Now, a generation after his death, his paintings are worth upward of half a million dollars.


Bete Comme un Peintre, pastel on paper, Francis X. Olivier, 1978

Now for the news.

Currado Malaspina has been slowly selling his collection of Olivier's work, living quite well off of work he had acquired as gifts. This would not in itself be questionable had not Malaspina promise a dying Olivier to keep his collection intact and to ensure the well being of his heirs (wife, ex-wife, two mistresses, three legitimate children and two illegitimate children).

Legal? Yes

Ethical?

... this is the artworld ...

RIVALS WITHOUT RIOTS

2011-11-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

Robust and consuming competition, the traditional trigger of artistic innovation is an abiding ethic with my avid compadre Currado Malaspina. "Depict the Vicar," the recent world-wide call to pencil and brush sponsored by UNNGO certainly brought out, if not the best at least the oddball in my dear, unpredictable friend Currado.

Currado Malaspina, "The State of Apostates" 2011

The parameters of the agon were quite simple: Depict an image of The Vicar of Yahweh using any type of media, in any format on any scale. The variety of work submitted to the UNNGO was truly astounding and speaks well of the international artistic community. The painter Jean-Paul Paulson from Brugge did a terrific oversized woodcut that may have been a bit too offensive for some of the judges. Dahlia Danton, currently living in India, incorporated images of Ganesh, Rajiv Montonaghanev and Rabindranath Tagore into a expertly executed Van Eyck like egg tempera painting. Not to be outdone, Shari-Lea Grossbard from Bethesda made a mural-sized quilt based on the Mosaic and Wiccan traditions.

The clear winner, though not without controversy, was Berlin's Manfred Fruchtwasser whose understated pastel on paper struck the jury as both lovely and appropriate.

UNNEGO "Depict the Vicar" judge Seymour Naqshbandi with Manfred Fruchtwasser's winning drawing.

In Kitchen Cups Concupiscent Curds

2011-11-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

The premature death of Roman philosopher Raimondi Modi was a bitter blow to my good friend Currado Malaspina. Known more for his unusual lifestyle than for his tuneless, sibylline prose, Modi felt much more at home sipping Campari and soda at Caffee Greco on Via del Condotti, then lecturing to his bored yet adoring students at La Pontificia Università.


Raimondi Modi, 2010

Raimondi's only significant contribution to contemporary European intellectual discourse can be found in the obscure Italian periodical La Scoreggia, in a piece he allegedly scribbled while waiting for a CT Scan at Salvator Mundi International Hospital. Titled Dialettica come un Raccolto in Contanti, (Translated alternately as "Dialectic as a Cash-Crop" The Basil Review XXVI no. 9, "Bonanza!" London Review, Spring 1995 and "A Question of Thyme" Best Essays Anthology, Ontario University Press 2002), Raimondi famously argued that impure idioms carry greater conviction and are more resolute when the shared responsibility of language loosens its empirical dominance. It was a revolutionary concept at the time and it remains vigorously debated to this day although its relevance has long been superseded by the recent findings of Laclos and Gremaine.

He and Currado were always allied in a petulant consanguinity - two rotten peas in a putrescent pod. Admired more than loved, tolerated more than appreciated and far more indulged than actually understood, Raimondi and Malaspina represent that dying breed of highbrowed cosmopolitan flaneurs that flooded the byways and bistros of southern Europe in the 1980's and 90's.

Raimondi Modi ... requiescat in pace ...

HAGIOGRAPHY

2011-10-27T23:18:00.000-07:00

The grand atelier of Currado Malaspina at 93 rue Clapeyron is, among other things, a shrine to Micah Carpentier.

Shortly after the great Cuban artist's death, Currado saw to it that Carpentier's assets remain fluid. The Cuban government made no secret of its intention to fossilize both Micah and his work, declaring his Avenida 20 de Mayo studio a national landmark and a public museum. This, of course, would have consigned what little Carpentier left behind to the spiders and cockroaches. Currado, in what remains to date his one and only noble endeavor, lobbied UNESCO to intervene.

And so it is that Micah Carpentier's eccentric furniture, his votive candles, his personal momentos and his beloved, ill-tuned piano all reside in the 8th Arrondissement.

What remains of his work, the paper bags - the Chinese take-out drawings, the 48 Stations of Ecstasy - are scattered throughout the world and it will be the thankless task of some venerable future scholar to finally assemble this work into a coherent whole.

The definitive Micah Carpentier still dwells within a Latin shroud of mystery and I for one do not trust Currado Malaspina to guard and maintain this legacy.

Micah Carpentier at work. Havana 1971

RIMBAUD'S TEARS

2011-10-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

The brilliant concert pianist, Philippa Monte-Zahav, in addition to practically owning the twenty-four miniature masterpieces known as Chopin's Preludes (Telmas Records 1999) is an unapologetic exhibitionist. To put it bluntly, she loves to take off her clothes.


Brouillard D'Après-Midi, Currado Malaspina, 2011

She is the subject, and perhaps even the object, of Currado's latest series of works entitled Larme.

They met a few years back in Madrid at a dinner party hosted by the legendary saloon singer, Baku Epstein. They knew each other by reputation and were immediately struck by how many people they had in common. Malaspina was in town delivering a series of talks at the Prado on 7th century BC Etruscan Kantharos whose high curving vertical handles he once likened to "les seins du grand-mère." Monte-Zahav was there recording Satie's Sarabandes.

Currado claims he was drawn to the pianist because he found her so uncannily sexless. She remembers their early encounters rather differently but it was in Madrid where the germ of the Larme project originated.

It took a few years for the two of them to coordinate their heavily congested schedules but thanks to a grant from the French Ministry of Archived Scores and Texts (Bureau des Textes et Partitions Archivées) Currado Malaspina and Philippa Monte-Zahav were able to put all their projects on hold and complete this amazing collaboration.

"It's one thing to pay an art model," Malaspina explained to me recently over a plate of marinated olives at Allard on Saint-André-des-Arts, "it's quite another when an amateur so avidly insists on baring all without scruple. Sensuality becomes clinical, mannered and theatrical and the frisson between artist and motif is altered beyond recognition."

I see his point.

PAPARAZZI

2011-09-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Ever since being awarded the prestigious Prix Mulet in 2009, Currado Malaspina has been badgered by paparazzi. Worn out by the pesterings and provocations of the dogged "entertainment press," he finally gave in and decided to ignore them. As a result, the French tabloids can be counted on to regularly publish scurrilous and compromising photographs of my beleaguered and indecorous friend.

On any given morning, an ill-focused photo will appear depicting the Continent's most beloved Lothario fixed in drowsy embrace with another vedette du cinéma, fashion model, socialite or innominate blanchisseuse. One gets the impression that Currado spends all his valuable time pursuing fleeting intimacies.

How can a grown man allow his polymorphously perverse, arrested sexual development be exposed in front of a callous and critical public and still maintain some modicum of self-respect? This is not some small matter of indiscretion or a harmless though antiquated expression of the French conceit of "droit de seigneur." No, Malaspina is a frail, emotionally impecunious adolescent.

I dare say, there are other ways to dwell in the public's imagination, pursue prominence and garner renown.

IlIUM IS ABLAZE

2011-09-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

Mime, considered by some as the stepchild to serious theater or the awkward actor's version of the bagatelle, has always been a guilty pleasure of my good friend Currado Malaspina. Mime troupes like The Oxford Ritualists, Omlette and Le Antilopi Fame, though indisputably coarse and uncultured, have traditionally maintained a loyal and devoted following among French artists and intellectuals.

The Oxford Ritualists, Dublin, 2006

The Oxford Ritualists, known mostly for their mute reenactments of musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar and Come Fly Away, have for years been fixtures at Malaspina's huge rue Gassendi atelier. Currado regularly hosts what he calls "cene di pantomima," lavish dinners where plates of exotic game are served to silent guests wearing togas and kothornoi.

After much heavy drinking, improvisational mime games are played where quiet, passionate arguments sometimes devolve into bitter fistfights or worse.

By far, the most outrageous, if not the most talented ensemble is Le Antilopi Fame, comprised of the cousins Kaj and Ezra Antilopi and their Uncle Heikki. Canonized in their native Finland, Le Antilopi have performed at street fairs, arts festivals, opera houses, coffee shops, comedy clubs, art museums, amphitheaters, soccer stadiums and anywhere else where their unique social commentary can be effectively expressed.

They created a bit of a scandal this summer at the Kaajani Fringe Festival when they presented a moving yet comic rendering of The Trojan Women with sets and costumes by Los Angeles artist Dahlia Danton.

The performance was briefly interrupted by a small group of feminists and trade union activists who saw the piece as a mocking, ill-mannered apotheosis of housework. Particularly galling was the scene where Talthybius, played by Kaj Antilopi, carried the body of the baby Astyanax on a dented TV tray while noisily munching on a bag of Bizli, a spicy snack food popular with Finnish and Scandinavian children.

The piece, hailed by most local critics, was written by Heikki who, like Currado, is always looking for a juicy succès de scandale. Indeed, the two are cut from the same transgressive cloth.

Le Antilopi Fame, Kaajani Fringe Festival, September 2011 (left to right, Heikki Antilopi, Kaj Antilopi, Ezra Antilopi)

Mauvaise Caractère

2011-08-14T00:23:00.000-07:00

Alsatian painter, Seytal Reclus, is known less for his own work than for the profound influence he had over an entire generation of 20th century French artists. From his esteemed academic perch at L'Ecole Royale D'Art Decoratifs et de Dessin, Reclus can claim the likes of Carpentier, Goutauld, Goldmann and my dear friend Currado Malaspina as former students.

Seytal Reclus, Self-Portrait. 1933

A common trait found in practically all of Reclus' students is a cut-throat, ill-tempered, paranoiac competitiveness. Reclus used to tell anyone who would listen "tu aimeras ton voisin que si elle porte une jupe."

Another fractured biblical injunction frequently used by Reclus was "זכור את עמלק"

"Remember Amalek!"

To Reclus, "Amalek" meant anyone who at any time had ever done or said anything that even remotely interfered with your intentions.

The fact that Reclus' own paintings are eminently forgettable is evidenced by the self-portrait reproduced above. Even for a piece of juvenilia painted nearly a decade before World War II, it seems hopelessly derivative and unpromising. His later work, or what remains of it - his Paris studio was looted by the Nazis - showed little if any development or maturity.

Perhaps that explains his petulance - his sad fate as an avant-gardist manqué. Maybe his disappointment and despair fed an already fragile ego, turning someone who by nature was merely disagreeable into a complete and total asshole.

Whatever the case, his legacy lives on in my comrade and colleague, Currado Malaspina.

TRUTH UNTOUCHED WITH MADNESS

2011-07-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

Currado Malaspina's thoroughly idiosyncratic rendering of Oedipus Rex at the Austruche Theater was a disaster.

To call the production "unorthodox" would only invite an empty analysis of orthodoxy. So peculiar and disjunctive a work has not been seen in Paris since Utmaoux directed Phaedre at the Chochotte. With elaborately baroque sets designed by the Los Angeles based artist Dahlia Danton and inflatable rubber costumes engineered by Capote-Rhone SA the work is visually unfriendly though not altogether displeasing. Imagine Fragonard with helium balloons in a Vegas wedding chapel during a skirmish of Gog and Magog.

The problem lies in the fact that the Paris of Sarkozy is not the Paris of Alfred Jarry. Next door to the Autruche Theater where Malaspina's work was staged is the fast-food restaurant Lolos, the Parisian equivalent to Hooter's. Directly across the street is the Disney owned Auchan hypermarket and down the block is a Trader Joe's. Malaspina's Oedipe Roi played to near empty houses while just a few blocks south at the Louie Braille Theater on rue Chapon, the musical EuroSpongeBob enjoyed nightly sell-outs.

Il n'ya pas de justice.

STRUCTURAL SEMIOLOGY IT IS NOT

2011-06-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

LIKE TOCQUEVILLE AND BAUDRILLARD BEFORE HIM, CURRADO MALASPINA EMBARKED ON A SEARCH FOR "LA VRAIE AMÉRIQUE." PACKING A LEICA Q8151 DELUXE, A DOZEN UNLINED LEGAL PADS, A MOLESKIN SKETCHBOOK AND A MICROCASSETTE RECORDER, CURRADO COVERED OVER 4500 MILES IN THREE SHORT WEEKS.

from De la Démocratie en Amérique Recouvrer by Currado Malaspina, Editions Aubergine, 2011

DRAWN EQUALLY TO THE GANGRENOUS, THE EMINENT, THE DEGENERATE AND THE TRANSCENDENT, CURRADO LOITERED, SAUNTERED, IMBIBED, EMBROILED, SEDUCED, INVEIGLED AND RELAXED HIS WAY THROUGH THIRTY-NINE OF THE FIFTY STATES.

THE PRODUCT OF HIS PEREGRINATIONS IS A HEFTY NEW BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLISHED BY EDITIONS AUBERGINE ENTITLED DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA REDUX. IN IT YOU WILL FIND LUSH, DESCRIPTIVE IMAGES OF A COUNTRY AND A CULTURE AS VARIED AS IT IS VAST. SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A DISTINGUISHED FRENCH PAINTER, THE PICTURES IN THIS VOLUME STAND ON THEIR OWN AS INDEPENDENT WORKS OF ART.

MY PARTICULAR FAVORITE, SEEN ABOVE, IS FROM LOS LUNAS NEW MEXICO. CAPTURED BEHIND THEIR DILAPIDATED "CASA MEXICANA" TWO SHIRTLESS RAGAMUFFINS IDLY WADE WITHIN A SAD SUMMER CONTRAPTION MADE FROM AN OLD RED TARP AND A GREEN GARDEN HOSE. UNDER THE CLEAR, ARID DESERT SUN,THESE ADORABLE YET IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN INNOCENTLY MISTAKE THE SPRINKLER FOR THE SEA.

MY FAVORITE PART OF THE PHOTOGRAPH, AND THIS IS THE MALASPINA GENIUS, IS THE QUIET DIGNITY IN WHICH THE BRIGHTLY COLORED PLASTIC SANDALS LINE THE EDGE OF THE PARCHED YARD. "THIS IS THE MAJESTY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE," THE PICTURE SEEMS TO ANNOUNCE. WHILE THE GROSS DISPARITY BETWEEN THE AMERICAN CLASSES REMAINS UNPARALLELED IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, THESE TWO DISINHERITED CHILDREN STUBBORNLY MAINTAIN THE QUIXOTIC HOPE IN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE.

BRAVO, CURRADO!!

Ἀπελλῆς

2011-06-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

BOOK STALLS FROM ATHENS TO THESSALONIKI ARE DOING A BRISK TRADE IN AN UNLIKELY BOOK. DASHED OFF ON A NAPKIN IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, CURRADO MALASPINA'S POLEMICAL CONFESSION CUM HISTORICAL MANIFESTO - OSTENSIBLY PREMISED ON PLINY THE ELDERS' RENDERING OF APELLES - HAS TEMPORARILY DIVERTED THE GREEKS FROM THEIR ECONOMIC WOES.

IT'S MORE OF A PAMPHLET OR A CHAPBOOK THAN A FULL THROATED DISSERTATION. IT'S A BROCHURE, A BOOKLET, MAYBE EVEN A LEAFLET BUT CERTAINLY NOT A TOME OR A SERIOUS SCHOLARLY EXERTION. SO WHY ARE GREEKS SO TAKEN BY IT?

FOR ONE, IT'S FULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH CURRADO'S SCABROUS SCRIBBLES THAT EUROPEANS ARE SO TAKEN WITH. ANOTHER REASON MAY BE THAT THEY SEE IT AS A VEILED CRITIQUE OF MIRIAM ALEXANDRATOU, THE CONTROVERSIAL LARISSIAN PAINTER WHOSE STIFF RENDERINGS OF NESTING ROCK PIGEONS ARE THIS YEAR'S RAGE AT THE VENICE BIENNALE.

IT REMAINS A MYSTERY HOW A SHORT, SLIGHT BOOK BY A SHORT, FAT MAN CAN IGNITE A NATION'S COLLECTIVE PASSION WITH SUCH VEHEMENCE. WHEN THE WORK WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRANCE OVER A DECADE AGO IT BARELY LEFT A TRACE ON THE GALLIC CULTURAL LANDSCAPE.

THEN AGAIN - THE HELLENIC FOUNDATION OF CULTURE HAS YET TO HONOR JERRY LEWIS

Anticipates Post While Pre-Dating Neo

2011-06-03T13:21:00.000-07:00

FEW PEOPLE REALIZE THAT PRECEDING THE RAGE FOR PICTORAL IMAGERY THAT CHARACTERIZED THE NEW YORK ART SCENE IN THE 1980'S, A SMALL BUT INFLUENTIAL GROUP OF PARISIAN PAINTERS CAPTURED EUROPE'S IMAGINATION WITH THE STIRRING OPULENCE OF THEIR RECIDIVIST WORK.

Questionnez Vos Petites Cuillers, Currado Malaspina, oil on canvas. 1973

SUBJECTED TO THE CRITICAL RACK AND CURATORIAL THUMBSCREW OF THE REIGNING AMERICAN PATRICIANS OF THE TIME, THIS PICKLED COTERIE OF ARTISTIC ADVENTURERS WERE TACTLESSLY IGNORED EVERYWHERE WEST OF BORDEAUX.

THE YOUNGEST MEMBER AND UNOFFICIAL MASCOT OF WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS L'ÉQUIPE DE RÊVEURS INSOLENT WAS MY GOOD FRIEND, CURRADO MALASPINA. HIS WORK AT THE TIME CLEARLY ANTICIPATES MUCH OF WHAT DOMINATED THE CAVERNOUS SHOWROOMS OF WEST BROADWAY CIRCA 1980 - 1985. THAT HE IS RARELY GIVEN CREDIT FOR HIS BROAD INFLUENCE IS SOMETHING HE ATTRIBUTES TO "LE PROVINCIALISM ET DE L'ARROGANCE" OF THE NEW YORK ARTWORLD OF THAT ERA.

THIS GROSS INJUSTICE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE. IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE ART HISTORIAN VIOLETTA GUISE OF THE ACADEMIE DES ORDURES AND MOSHE NAVARRE, DIRECTOR OF PARIS' GALERIE FER A CHEVAL, A COMPREHENSIVE EXHIBITION CONNECTING EARLY MALASPINA WITH ITS AMERICAN OFFSPRING IS ABOUT TO OPEN THIS SUMMER AT THE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE AUDRUICQ.

THOUGH IT REVEALS CURRADO'S VAPID AND CALLOW JUVENILIA, THE CORRECTIVE IS LONG OVERDUE!

Sortir où que vous soyez

2011-05-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

CURRADO MALASPINA HAS DISAPPEARED.

Currado Malaspina, April 4th 2011. The last time Currado has been seen.

I received a call a few nights ago from Bistaque Malaspina, Currado's youngest daughter and his only offspring that is still on speaking terms with the notoriously petulant artist. Sullen and bereft Bisty explained that her father was particularly downcast of late. Disappointed in the tepid critical response he received recently in the United States, Currado became despondent, cynical and uncharacteristically mordant. He was particularly galled by the physical violence his work had to endure in Los Angeles.

"Les Américains sont un peuple grossier," was how he put it to his daughter the last time they spoke.

Nonetheless Bistaque Malaspina remains hopeful.He has done this before. Seventeen years ago after South Korea won the World Cup, Currado was so incensed he moved to Échirolles and worked for six months in a rayon factory. He returned to Paris only after his landlord hired a private detective to retrieve the dilatory rent.

I post this most recent photograph in the hopes that one of my readers can contact us with some useful information.

DE MEESTER VAN BELGIË

2011-04-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

IT WAS 35 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH WHEN IN THE SLENDER SPRIG OF MISSPENT YOUTH CURRADO MALASPINA AND I FIRST BECAME ACQUAINTED. AS NEW STUDENTS WE WERE BOTH CONSUMED WITH A GLUT OF EARLY ENTHUSIASM HAVING DISCOVERED AT THE ECOLE SUPÉRIEURE DE GRAVURE ET GRIFFONNAGE IN BRUSSELS THAT OUR TWINNED DESTINY LAY IN THE ARTS.

THOUGH WE BOTH HAVE RADICALLY DEVIATED FROM THE NORMS OF BOOKISH DOGMATISM AND THE BRAVURA OF METICULOUS ACADEMICISM, OUR EARLY FORMATION IN CLASSICAL DRAFTSMANSHIP HAS PROVEN TO BE INDISPENSABLE. WE OWE OUR SKILLS AND OUR ETHIC TO THE LEGENDARY LIFE DRAWING INSTRUCTOR, PROFESSEUR REGIS KYOMBE.


Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Bibliothèque VanDido, Ghent)

Sadly, Kyombé perished in the 1982 Schaerbeek Gauffre Fabriek fire but his sovereign and vital legacy remains intact. The VanDido Library of Ghent has recently published the catalogue raisonné of Kyombé's classroom demonstration drawings and a traveling exhibition has recently opened in Bruges (followed by stops in Montpellier, Wiesbaden, Newark and San Francisco).

Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Bibliothèque VanDido, Ghent)

Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Private collection)

Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Bibliothèque VanDido, Ghent)

Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Private collection)

WHO WAS THAT WOMAN?

2011-04-03T01:51:00.000-07:00

THE OPENING OF THE SHOW THE GASP OF LOVE IN TERZA RIMA DID NOT GO AS PLANNED.

The resplendently disturbed young woman who in a frothing paroxysm of irrational indignation tore off the gallery wall one of Currado Malaspina's drawings and ripped it into quarters was identified by several attendees as the French chanteuse Venus Anaïs.

It has been rumored for quite some time that Malaspina and Anaïs' very secret yet very public romance had decayed into a rancid culvert of iniquitous melodrama. Her startling outburst at the April 2nd opening at ALT/SPACE LA may have offered a means by which we can finally decode some of Currado's ravishingly repulsive iconography.

Anaïs has always felt that she was swindled into submissiveness, seduced into the role of silent siren and toyed into the task of temporary muse. Her sole job was to enable Malaspina to create an explicit visual diary of his amorous athleticism. It now seems fairly certain that the works exhibited in Los Angeles are graphic depictions of a passion long passed. They render Venus Anaïs as a vessel for an empyrean rapture and the ecstatic consummation of Malaspina's rapacious concupiscence.

The coupling has evidently left someone's cup only half full.

THE PAULINE EPISTLES

2011-03-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

Currado Malaspina's visual jeremiads are both jarring and hysterically funny. His recent religious awakening has aroused in him a deep fascination with Les Epitres aux Thessaloniciens, specifically those of St. Paul. On a recent visit to his Rue Charles Hermite studio, the walls were ablaze with auspicial Miltonian injunctions and augurial Blakean prophecies, all floridly illuminated with Malaspinian flair.

THE PEREGRINATIONS OF AN INDIFFERENT INTELLECTUAL

2011-03-07T00:22:00.000-08:00

Currado Malaspina has a winter residence in the port city of Oran on the northwestern Mediterranean coast of Algeria. It is there where he does most of his writing and it was there, while working on "The Suspended Globe" that he met the anthropologist Veronique Mouloudia.

Currado Malaspina on Boulevard Djemaa Gazouna, Oran, Algeria, 2011

A post-structuralist by confession though a neo-romantic by inclination, Mouloudia has always been a lighting rod for those who follow the French academy. Her work is dense with sentences like "form follows ideal structures though a dungeon of Hegelian emblems of perceived truths" (Saussure Deciphered, Gallimard 2001) and "the quasi-mystical limits of Giordano Bruno's superstructure of materialism sets in motion codes of behavioral signification without coherence. (The Elided What If, New Press 2006)"

Malaspina nobly pretends to understand but theory is decidedly not his strong suit.

On a recent sojourn to Oran, Currado and Veronique hosted a seminar at the Salah-al Din Sahloon el-Arabia entitled "The Role of 12th Century Illuminated Manuscripts on the Dialectic of Desire." Malaspina was seen on several occasions dosing off while distinguished attendees delivered their papers. By the third day he stopped showing up altogether and spent his days sipping Turkish coffee and taking long walks on Boulevard Djemaa Gazouna.

TERZA TURPITUDE

2011-02-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

The threshold for what we in the United States might characterize as "priapic infelicity" enjoys a much wider berth among the French. The public in general is much more at ease with matters pertaining to the appetites.

In a career spanning several tumultuous decades Currado Malaspina, neither in his work nor in his behavior, has ever faced derision on the grounds of impropriety. Figures such as Choderlos de Laclos, Ernest-Armand Dubarry, Isidore Ducasse and the Marquis de Sade are never looked upon as scurrilous aberrations but rather as part and parcel of the Republic's patrimony. The opprobrious sneers and discourtesies that Malaspina suffered throughout the years were strictly on the grounds of aesthetic indiscretions and intellectual misconduct.

Though it is true that Currado's three wives and multiple mistresses circumnavigated the severe, puritanical geometry of a linear time-line, scandal, in the American sense, was as alien to him as processed cheese. To the French, Currado Malaspina is an artist of the first rank ... period.

That is why we are so astonished to learn that the feminist advocacy organization, Women Are Revered, or WAR, are planning a boycott and a series of demonstrations surrounding the April exhibition at ALT/SPACE LA. There is even talk of a social media campaign dedicated to denying Currado a visa on the grounds of obscenity!

This exercise in political burlesque must be met forcefully and unambiguously by the art community and by all good people who cherish our first amendment rights. Please make your voices heard.

SCANDAL IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNA

2011-02-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

The year was 1979. Young, brash Currado Malaspina was the toast of Montparnasse. He lived a life of unremorseful dissipation. His monthly reenactments of the Carnevale di Venezia, staged with the florid flourish of campy faux-baroque pageantry, were attended by a veritable who's who of Parisian high and gutter society alike.

These disparate groups were unanimous in their enthusiasm for Curardo and in their avid, if slightly slanted interest in the miscellany of sexual expression. It was precisely in that period when Currado, due more to his art than to his behavior, became a prominent fixture within the European demimonde.

Les Maquettes du Marquis, a series of tactless works-on-paper, produced as a commission for the lavishly libertine Comptesse de Buford, has recently found its way into the estate of Artur Mont-Or, one of southern California's most predatory art collectors. There are rumors circulating among those who know about such things that these rare works will be exhibited for the first time in an undisclosed Los Angeles gallery.

It is not quite clear whether the works will be for sale.

José Martí Swivels in his Crypt

2011-01-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

Presumably a thaw descends upon the enchanted island of Cuba. The tropical sun is beginning to shed a dim light on an adumbral past. Crimes both great and small committed on behalf birdbrained ideologies and perpetrated with bureaucratic efficiency, (albeit with a clave beat) are finally being discussed more or less openly. No crime lures me closer to the lash of vengeance than the murder, (yes, murder) of my dear friend and mentor, Micah Carpentier.

I was honored to have been commissioned by the Micah Carpentier Foundation to direct the short video below:

SPRING PYREXIA

2011-01-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

CURRADO MALASPINA IS PREPARING FOR HIS FIRST NORTH AMERICAN EXHIBITION IN OVER TWO YEARS!!

Both Currado and the fine citizens of Southern California are bracing themselves for this important event.

This coming spring at the campy, curious and intrepidly avant-garde Los Angeles gallery,

ALT /SPACE @ Top Tomato

the deviant but delightful Malaspina will captivate and disturb the solicitous dwellers of America's strangest state with his wonderful antics and artifacts.

Don't miss it!

RETOOLING EPICTETUS

2010-12-31T09:01:00.000-08:00

"MAGNIFICENCE INVOLVES EXPENDITURES WHICH WE CALL HONORABLE"


Currado Malaspina

This Artistotelian formulation finds its way into the daily conversation of my pretentious colleague, Currado Malaspina, at the most absurd and inappropriate times. He carries a worn copy of the Nicomachean Ethics in his coat pocket and quotes from it freely. In the aftermath of a minor traffic accident at the traitorous intersection of Rue Juliette Dodu and Avenue Claude Vellefaux, Currado observed to the irate owner of a newly dented Citroën Saxo that "... the morally weak who lose themselves in impetuous emotion are better than those who have a rational principle but do not abide by it." When his car insurance was subsequently canceled he bemoaned how "small people may have charm ... but not beauty."

Currado embodies Paul Valéry's description of the poetic temperament, "the sensation of being everything and the certitude of being nothing." He is both pompous and pure, deliriously megalomaniacal and comically self-effacing. E. M. Cioran, another Malaspina favorite, suggested that "the company of mortals is, for a lucid man, pure torture," and this explains Currado's lack of close friends.

In a 1997 interview with Haftora Magazine Currado confided to renown clinical psychologist Beto Azzuri that his eminent sense of detachment is a bias as flawed as any other. "I recognize death and exile (la mort et l'exile) as the mitigating arteries of the well-intentioned life (la vie bien intentionnée)," he began promisingly enough, "but covetousness (convoitise) is the human condition and should not be tampered with too dramatically."

AN AWAKENING

2010-12-17T00:02:00.000-08:00

Dear friend, I have reread the Gospels in my newfound confinement and the inscrutable conclusions that I have drawn are painfully disquieting .... 

So states the bizarre missive that sits on my desk like a naked fuse. From the Boisset psychiatric hospital where my long suffering friend Currado Malaspina is now taking the cure, lengthy manifestos and rambling disquisitions are springing from his pen with a stridency bordering on the erotic.

He has found religion, though I'm not quite certain toward which deity he directs his faith.

He frequently mentions Saint John Climacus, also known as John the Ladder, who from the Vatos Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai lived a barren life of pious asceticism. The undeniably beautiful drawing above was sent to me recently, inscribed on the back with one of the 7th century monk's most curious aphorisms:

"He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted: those who are inclined to purity are not so."

Currado has taken a physical detour which has unquestionably anchored him in a self-knowledge previously inaccessible.

MADNESS BECOMES CURRADO

2010-12-11T09:20:00.000-08:00

BATHED IN ABSINTHIAN WISTFULNESS & MELANCHOLIC NOSTALGIA, CURRADO MALASPINA SITS BY THE WINDOW OF HIS SMALL CELL AND SKETCHES SCENES FROM HIS PAST.

Rough, awkward but unmistakably heartfelt, Currado Malaspina's small new drawings are a sad, strong testament to his decayed vanity. Scrawled with a primitive hand-carved quill, these precious tracings are explicit maps of his wretched, broken mind.

In 1998, as a guest of Charo Valrhona, Cuba's genteel Minister of Arts and Sports, Currado was feted by the island's top luminaries. He played tennis with three time Olympic champion Donatello Borges, sang madrigals with the immortal coloratura Dobry Den Esponoza, discussed Hegel with the controversial cultural critic Djudeo Espanyol and went horseback riding with Fidel's nephew, the great harness racer Ocucaje Castro.

His very public romance with the very married Romina Magia of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba was the cause of great scandal. A vigil of international journalists camped in front of the Bosque Hotel in central Havana where he rented a suite of rooms. When Romina's husband Francesco blackened Currado's lower lip under the reproachful gaze of Che Guevara, the hungry shutters clicked in a tap dance of prurient fascination.

The other day, I received in the mail the above drawing. On the back was an inscription which read: "c'était la valeur la douleur."

CURRADO'S DEMONS

2010-12-03T23:23:00.000-08:00

I often puzzle over the shrill and petty tone Currado takes when he writes about me and my work.Though I'm not one who is quick to take offense, the cumulative effect of his snide screeds and astringent asides is a weight I must reluctantly bear.

Hospitalier Spécialisé de Boisset, Western wall

Hospitalier Spécialisé de Boisset is a psychiatric care facility near the Dordogne River Valley. Among its illustrious alumni are the writers Shmuel Jacot and Delphine Issey-Ponqet, the painters Koloy and Iguire and the great mid-century songsmith Vuillet de Monchard.

At the time of this writing, residing in said hospital and under the watchful eye of both admirable and dubious clinicians is my poor, dear friend, Currado Malaspina.

It seems he has been diagnosed as paranoiac, His condition is apparently exacerbated by his drug addictions. I'm told he is delusional and unstable. He alternates between states of lyric eloquence and deranged hysteria. He's willfully incontinent. He doesn't eat.

I have chosen to attribute Currado Malaspina's demoniac diatribes to his nascent madness.

He still has his computer so don't expect an abatement of his attacks any time soon.

CURRADO'S CAPACIOUS CURIOSITY

2010-11-23T19:08:00.000-08:00

The Mendoza Archive in Metz is a trove of legal documents, odd dissertations, illuminated manuscripts and scholarly tomes. During a recent trip to nearby Pont-à-Mousson visiting my good friend Currado Malaspina, we stopped by the archive and met with its director, Yves Mendès-Faure.


The Tupfen Sephirot, 17th century

Dr. Mendès-Faure, whose most recent book Thwarted Sensation in Lurianic Ecstatic Literature (Provo Press 2010), is a specialist in Cordoveran Kabbalah. Together with A. Gashmi and Jimmy Ramak, he compiled and edited the complete correspondence of Abu Ahmad Ja'far ibn 'Ubaid and Khitan Liao. As director of the archive he has curated several exhibitions of Judaica including the controversial Sephirot Ensemble which assembled over four-hundred Sephirot images, hand-painted by gentiles.

Currado wanted to see John Donne's famous Tupfen painting but we were told it had been stolen in a daredevil burglary while on exhibit in Rabat. The image above is a reproduction from the Encyclopédie d'Ésotérisme.

עשרת הדיברות

2010-11-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

On the wide double-door of his professional Axima frigo, Currado Malaspina has a curious grouping of post-it notes. Not your typical reminders of doctor's appointments or grocery lists but behavioral prompts straight out of one of his favorite books, the Old Testament.

The Decalogue has always been a source of conflict for my agnostic friend. Whereas he has no trouble with "thou shalt not steal," (unless of course it is a matter of someone's ideas), or "thou shalt not commit murder," he's always had a weakness for adultery. And though in keeping with the spirit if not the letter of the 5th commandment, (taking time throughout the years to remember his mother's birthday), he always thought that the 2nd, from the point of view of a practicing artist, was simply bad for business.

So each time he reaches in to grab a new bottle of Blanquette de Limoux he is confronted with a list of the top ten prohibitions of the ancients. It's a sobering salute to the aesthetics of the taboo.

Constraint and obstruction are not your typical Malaspina tropes and it's hard to say whether these idiosyncratic allusions are meant to be reverential or ironic. A large lithograph depicting commandment no. 4 was recently bought by an anonymous representative of the Viljandene hasidim of Kirias Lilith, New York. They've always been known to have a greater affinity for the burlesque then their neighbors the Bobover.

THE ROSSEBUURT EDITION

2010-11-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

The series of twenty-two hand-colored aquatints known to collectors as The Rossebuurt Edition have finally been exhibited in the city of their origin.

Aafje, 1981

Photographers have depicted the courtesans of the Rossebuurt as shop window bibelots and Hollywood has turned them into a metaphor for raunchy cupidity but it was not until Currado Malaspina applied his tender touch has the subject been treated with the refinement and respect it deserves.

Amsterdam's Galerij Coenraad Johannes on Prinsengracht has recently staged a stunning exhibition that included all twenty-two prints plus scores of studies, proofs and related works-on-paper. Inspired by the play La Bulesca and the letters of Veronica Franco these lovely images are touching tributes to a class of women typically maligned by coarse caricature.

Like most mortals, Currado is not exempt from the fineries of cliché. In the course of his extensive research he developed a near fanatical obsession with the storied seductress, Aafje Minahasan. He pleaded with her to leave the dubious comforts of the Doop Horenkast and live with him as man and girlfriend.

She wisely demurred and is currently the aging mistress of a former Minister of Immigration and Asylum.

I LUSSURIOSI

2010-10-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

Currado Malaspina has been working on a series of hand-colored monotypes based on Dante's depiction of the second circle of Hell.


SEMIRAMÌS, Malaspina, 2010

Malaspina has always insisted that Dante's condemnation of these carnal malefactors was at best halfhearted. As a lapsed Catholic and a strident opponent of chastity this is hardly surprising.

What seems far more astonishing is that this new completed series will be published in book form by Fedeli Edizioni, the official publishing house of L'Ordine di San Otto.

Michele Scottman, principle editor of Fideli is "thrilled to publish this important artistic document" and sees no conflict with its subject matter or style. Pre-ordered advance copies of the first edition have already sold out and Scottman predicts that I Lussuriosi will out perform Fideli's last major blockbuster,I Modi di Preghiera Estatica in Roma di Secolo Diciassettesima.

HOMO LUDENS

2010-10-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

There are hundreds of little slips of paper tacked on the walls of Currado Malaspina's Rue Picot studio. If you ask him about the significance of these miniature cryptograms, most likely he'll shrug and quickly change the subject.

There's a pained eloquence about these somber images. I've often speculated about their meaning. Throughout the years I have arrived at a number of vague surmises.

1. These are nothing but idle doodlings, freely associated images void of any allusion or narrative.

2. Based on the texts, these are shards of violent fantasies, tiny testaments to a diseased mind.

3. Considering Currado's extensive priapic peregrinations, these are diminutive trophies, capricious aide-mémoires, carnal baseball cards, virile notches scratched with the swagger of an aging Lothario.

4. Though never much of a collector of the works of others, these are drawings done by another hand entirely. Based on certain stylistic oddities, most likely the artist in question is Micah Carpentier .

I welcome any insight from any of my readers who are familiar the works in question.

EVERY LOVE IS LAUDABLE

2010-10-14T21:57:00.000-07:00

The mighty rabble of unreason, the prattlers of the pulpit, the blind banqueters of inanity, the blatherers, drivelers, twaddlers and knaves have all declared Currado Malaspina a menace to our young. "Obsédé par la gouttière" was how Monseigneur Eustace Etherlburga, pastor of L'Eglise Sainte de Chapele, Brabant described him in his weekly radio address last Sunday.

L'Animo ch'e` Creato ad Amar Presto, 1979

He may have been referring to a little known group of works-on-paper entitled "Felicità Raggiunta". Originally intended to illustrate the offbeat poems of Becolade Leonidas, the Raggiunte's graphic muscle was deemed ill-suited and inappropriate by Leonidas' long time publisher Gulyan Puratos.

The small suite of drawings surfaced recently at Bloedpens Bruxelles on rue Duquenois just off of Le Grand Place. A third-rate gallery on the fourth floor of a furniture warehouse, Bloedpens typically traffics in fake Hergé lithographs and the teacup poodle gouaches of Aimeus Gaufres. It turns out Malaspina's ex-wife Anaïs maliciously unloaded reams of Currado's early work in order to flood the market and subject her erstwhile husband's reputation to a good old fashioned lashing.

Fat chance!

Etherlburga's jeremiad has only added to the Malaspina spell. When last checked, the wait-list to acquire anything by Currado Malaspina, regardless of period or quality is about as long as the Antwerp Yellow Pages.

There's no such thing as bad publicity. Wasn't Tintoretto referred to as "the Menace of Venice"?

THE TERRIBLE PRICE OF HIGH CULTURE

2010-10-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Finally, after the difficult copyright negotiations, the pious familial hand-wringing, the censorious governmental grandstanding and the overly cautious publishing house indecision, the full and complete edition of The Letters of Currado Malaspina is set for release!

This is bad news.

Not for me. No. Not for Currado. Not for Gallimardon, the Beaubourg, the Nouvelle Revue Marginale de Livres, TF2, the Bibliothèque Calomnieux or the Académie de Trésors Nationaux. No. All of the above stand to profit regally not to say obscenely.

No. This is bad news for the many people, dare I say, the many women (for the lion's share of addressees are women) whose intimate confidences are about to be betrayed. Careers will be ruined, marriages destroyed, trusts violated and reputations sullied.

And for what??

For a few hundred beautifully annotated, erotically charged and delicately rendered epistolary drawings.

Hélas

HERMENEUTICS

2010-09-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

Maquette Pour Le Marquis #9

Though it pains me to say this, my dear friend Currado Malaspina has allowed himself to be infantilized by those closest to him. Those loving people who indulge his idiosyncratic posturing, his inconsonant and strident courtliness are doing him no favors.

Forgive my priggish propriety, my innocent (some might say chaste) instinct for discretion, but the savage audacity of Les Maquettes du Marquis goes a bit too far. With its shamelessly impudent luster, it conceals its detestable nature behind a bravura of painterly effects.

And yet, to my astonishment, this new series of works has been warmly if not ecstatically received by the critics and the public in equal measure! The day I visited the exhibition - a balmy though overcast early autumn afternoon, the kind of day where Parisians find lenient repose, a trim to their shock of vacation's adjournment - the line to enter the gallery wound itself, hydra-like, around Jardin Arago.

To add to my bewilderment, ´Epître Magazine featured a cover story by no less of an authority than Tabatha Coralie, devoting sixteen pages to a detailed exegetic summery of the entire Malaspina oeuvre!

I love Currado, but is something getting lost in translation?

INJUDICIOUS DICTATION

2010-08-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

The double contract, the skin and the immortal idol of love is but a pebble in the mouth of my good and flawed friend Currado Malaspina. The grateful gaiety which greeted his recent exhibition at Gallerie Livarot provoked in me nothing but a night-sweat of awkward embarrassment.


Maquettes de Marquis no. 14

For a man who drinks the fruit of life clenched within the lenience of raffish corruption, the Maquettes de Marquis series of drawings is just a flowerly coverlet of imposture. It's a carnival of melodrama posing as debauchery. It's license without lewdness. Simulated wickedness in the altercloth of expressionism.

Currado, be chivalrous in your defeat and stop simmering in the mildew of petty provocations. Try to retrieve the raw air of your innocent jejunity. Your new work, the overcooked cousin of your erstwhile genius, mocks the garbled loyalty of your purblind partisans.

SHRINES AT A CARNIVAL

2010-08-09T12:14:00.000-07:00


Currado Malaspina, Auvers-sur-Oise 1972

Not quite juvenilia though far from the chiselled concision of his present exchequerie, the Val-d'Oise landscapes pose an interesting problem for Malaspina scholars. The cascading froth of ecstatic brushwork is so unlike the pithy quicksilver of his more mature handwriting that many have attributed the radical shift to what historians now refer to simply as "the motorcycle accident."

Fifteen days in a coma and nearly as many blood transfusions, Currado Malaspina emerged from the scaffolded flames of near-death entirely transformed. His youthful temperament of optimism and joy became a trampled Troy of ruin. His broken bones were easily mended but his hammered heart turned cold. For years he has kept his Lucifer on a short leash of civility. His work, a phosphorent salvo of discontent, is another story.

Currado Malaspina, Argenteuil 1971

Let's all be grateful for his misfortune.

Currado Malaspina, 2009

Lecture d'Été

2010-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

In the extensive journals that Currado Malaspina kept from the winter of 1983 through the fall of 2003, no detail, no matter how inappurtenant was deemed too trivial for inclusion. This impressive catalog of events and emotions was recently published in an abridged form and in limited edition by Éditions Rénale. Plushly illuminated with the peculiar drawings that were interleaved throughout the original, this rare volume is essential to the understanding of Currado's peripatetic imagination. Aptly titled Saisons de l'Impiété et Incrédulité should be on everyone's summer reading list.

INACCESSIBLE BLISS

2010-06-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

The ravishments of romance are routine in the work and life of Currado Malaspina. Night's plush reflections, ecstatic transformation, the supple female figure ... paint.

A series of casual oil paintings, void of precious ornament, piously attentive to the ambiance of fulsome, perhaps even obsessive affection was recently exhibited at the Museu de Detalhes Poéticos in Belém do Pará.

The catalog essay by Danita Marcil is a rhapsody of luminous albeit superficial analysis. Much is made of the mysterious identity of the model, a fretful exercise in pedantic speculation.

The woman in question, whose unmistakably honeyed flesh is an ardent hymn to erotic iridescence is none other than Andreja Bogatyrchuk.

Andreja is the genesis of every impulse in Currado's life. She is his hallucination, his Circe, his fragrant field of easy passion and the source of his vehement despondency.

GIBBLETS FOR AN AGING MASTER

2010-05-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

"Tous mes anciens amants ont des moustaches"

Admittedly, it was tactless.

The comment that got Currado Malaspina fired from the Universiteit van Poperinge was fortuitous, for my good friend has no real talent for teaching. He lacks the patience and generosity required for such a task. (the event was witnessed by his then student Dahlia Danton).

Truth be told, Currado is rather worshipful of women and when married, tends to err on the side of uxoriousness. The fact that for the past 22 years he has worked exclusively with the female form is evidence enough of his extreme devotion and respect.

His current exhibition at Galerie Bourrer , which despite it repetitive nature and almost stubborn lack of invention received glowing reviews. Amalie Locdu went so far as to describe the new work as "a choir and song of visual stimulation the likes of which have not been seen in Paris since the days of Balthus, Matisse and Meremaquerelle!"

With all due respect to my good friend Currado, I think he's out of gas ...

DREAMING IN THE CAVE WHERE THE SIREN SWIMS

2010-04-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

PROUD POSILIPO

On a recent trip to Paris, I dropped in on my dear friend Currado Malaspina.

I reached him on the telephone and we agreed that I would come to his studio at 7:30 in the evening on Friday the 8th of January. I remember the date vividly because I had tickets for the opera the following night to see Anna Nerval as Salome.

I climbed the five flights of stairs at the appointed hour on the designated day only to find the following note tacked to his door: "Ne m'attends pas ce soir, car la nuit sera noire et blanche"

Typical Malaspina - rude, cryptic and irresistible - I broke into the studio, mostly out of frustration, though I told myself at the time it was in order to go to the bathroom.

On the walls of his studio were a dozen 10 foot high drawings all configured in the shape of a cross.

It was a staggering sight!

Knowing that there was a strong likelihood that I would force my way in, Currado left another note tacked to the wall near the light switch.

"Mon front est rouge encore du baiser de la reine"

I suppose he had a decent excuse.

MISSIVES FROM MALASPINA

2010-03-22T11:26:00.000-07:00

Most people familiar with Currado Malaspina's epistolary excesses suspect that to some degree this wonderfully gifted artist is slightly unhinged. His notes and scribbles are the subject of deep analysis from both experts in the arts and specialists in psychology. He has been likened both to Rilke and to Arthur Schnitzler. He has been compared to Balthus and to Franz Schreker. Even the names Adolf Wölfli and Jean-Baptiste de Boyer have come up from time to time.

To me he's a cross between Paul Éluard and Elmer Gantry.

IL FOCO LI ABBRUSCIA

2010-03-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

A minor scandal has erupted in the Marais! Pepo Cendrars' recent short film, Le Frisson Abattu included a raw shade of the Malaspina legend. It is well known that Currado holds the conventional decorum surrounding artist/model interaction in a heavy grief of disdain. He strongly feels that nature binds us to life by inclining us toward acts of sensual gratification. His provocative imagery is a tireless search for the appropriate metaphor for that bond. His demands on his models are famously punishing.

An "out-take" from Cendrars' film has been circulating and has divided Paris between the Malaspinusards and the anti-Malaspinusards. Some see it as a hostile breach in tradition. Others see it as a balletic shadow-play of Amour-Fou.

You decide.

THE WOOLEN LOVERS

2010-03-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

A string of dreams where pieces of God scattered like snowflakes within the narrow halls of memory carrying with them the fragrance of olive and clove yielded a strange series of drawings by Currado Malaspina known as Les Amants de Laine. Born to be a mandarin, Malaspina's flirtation with transgression is never fully persuasive yet with this particular suite of drawings, I think he stammers toward a certain level of success.

Brothers in Epicurus concur in this for the work appeals to those who cultivate indifference. It is a canticle to the senses and our eyes delight in its heedless, voluptuary abandon.

In a lecture delivered to a conference of art historians in Carcassonne I heard Malaspina intone what was taken at the time as an irrational jeremiad: "The sky is heavy with dishonored sensation" ("Le ciel est lourd avec sensation déshonoré ") His work and his life can be seen as both a reprimand and a correction. To Malaspina the 'rules' simply don't apply.

IN THE ABSENCE OF GRIEF

2010-02-25T09:48:00.000-08:00

Currado Malaspina & Zoe Bat-Leytzan
Malaspina seems to relish in the
the precarious. His unstable public and private conduct always capers on the crag of scandal. From his well-documented addiction to morphine to his gloomy obsession with fashion models and starlettes, Malaspina is a shattered cough of unhurried self-destruction.

That his career has flourished in the process says more of our societal fetish for frail celebrity than about his genuine contribution to the artistic discourse. One would have assumed that the publicity surrounding the horrific suicide of Zoe Bat-Leytzan would have been his undoing, but alas, Currado, the plaster manikin 0f monstrous unfeeling soldiers on.

MALASPINA MISSIVES

2010-02-10T07:12:00.001-08:00

The scholarship surrounding the oeuvre of Currado Malaspina is astonishing by any measure. Critics, art historians, pundits and poets have all weighed in throughout the years contributing to the ever expanding Malaspina literature. This recent video was sent to me by my former student and current Canadian Undersecretary of Domestic Housing, Chantalle Shegli.

It's nice to know that she is still interested in the arts.

THE MALASPINA CONFERENCE

2010-01-04T12:34:00.001-08:00

With the barbarously beautiful Paulette Appolinaire sitting by his side, Currado Malaspina slides the newly unwrapped disc into the compact video player. A note slips out from the slipcase: "apprécier, vous l'idiot fétide. baiser, manon".

SHEDDING THE LUSTER

2009-12-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

Swiss director, Pepo Cendrars has rinsed the pollen of hagiography from the Currado Malaspina myth machine. His brave new film will be released this coming spring and it promises to unravel the largely unexamined connection between Currado's chestnut charm his tactical priapic meanderings and his under-merited renown.

ENVERGURE

2009-10-12T11:58:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe but at one time Currado Malaspina was known simply as un homme de beaucoup mérite. His first foray into the international art scene was the 1979 Belarus Biennial where he shared the small French pavillion with six other artists. The show was an incoherent mishmash of parched academic miscellany and fortunately, lacking the prestige of other planetary art fairs, the event was scarcely noticed beyond the borders of Minsk.

He was happy at the time to be included in any exhibition and he showed the commensurate gratitude and grace. He impressed his peers by his humility and his professional generosity.

To pinpoint the exact date when Currado Malaspina became the petulant, egomaniacal narcissist bent on advancing his career while destabilizing the reputations of his colleagues is hard to do with any degree of certainty. Some contend that it was about the time he published the Pointed Plunder Manifesto. Others insist it was shortly after the tragic death of his second wife Celeste.

One thing all agree on is that this flawed genius has drifted light years away from that homme de beaucoup mérite. But allow me to indulge in a brief hallucination as I post above one of the drawings Currado exhibited in Minsk. This lovely piece is inscribed to me on the back and has been in my collection for nearly 30 years.

THE WORLD IS A MIRROR OF MYSELF DYING

2009-09-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

In the late 1970’s Currado Malaspina initiated an unlikely friendship with Henry Miller that lasted until the great writer’s death. Miller showed the young Malaspina great tenderness and took a keen interest in his work. A few of his early monotypes remain in the Miller estate and are only made available to researchers and scholars.

A few weeks ago Currado shared a few reminiscences with me while we had a wonderful lunch of rein et foie de veau at Bateau Calife on Quai Malaquais:

“’The whores of Montmartre were as cute as buttonholes’, Miller would exhale when the ravishing mists of memory would claw him away from his middle-class present. Seized by an irresistible urge to prevaricate, Miller’s eloquence was most gripping the more ignoble the myth. In a voice as raspy as a tailpipe he would rattle off names like Durrell and Cendrars and recount with excruciating detail episodes of inspired dissipation. To Henri, life was a book and the only pretext to living was to find something to write about.”

I’m not so sure I trust Currado’s account.

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF CURRADO MALASPINA

2009-09-01T10:57:00.001-07:00

"Desire," Currado wrote to me in a letter dated March 21st, 1993, "is both blind and brief and I'd best vanquish this impulse early and decisively."

The graceful dignity in Currado Malaspina's youthful correspondences shows a young man struggling with a tempestuous spirit. Calming what were then unutterable impulses took a heroic and ultimately hopeless discipline of self-denial. He taught himself a soft, perfect pitch in which to frame the daily crucible of his deferred raptures.

Malaspina continues to be a devoted epistolarian and his collected letters are soon to be published by Caillot Press. Clotted with vivid imagery, artful prose and philosophical insight, rarely has such a painful document of moral frailty been such a pleasure to read. Lustily illuminated with casual pen and ink jottings, this new volume will add much to the already rich catalog of Malaspina's oeuvre.

Lautréamont

2009-08-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

Foundation Domy Morgane, The Zurich based organization founded by the Swiss collector Pierre Hertzberg, has recently announced the publication of Lautréamont, a folio of prints by my dear friend Currado Malaspina. Dizzying in its range, the works are subtle reflections on the encyclopedic reservoir of erotic French literature.

In the United States, Malaspina has seen armaments of prudential cultural gatekeepers raining blows upon his reputation. In the eyes of one American academic, Malaspina is "... a sinking barge of ossified European libertinism." This new publication is being viewed in France as a gallant slap at the shrieking mice of political correctness.

I salute you Monsieur Hertzberg!

עבודה קיץ

2009-08-14T00:34:00.001-07:00

Micah Carpentier, 1968

To tour the Louvre with Currado Malaspina is to be subjected to an erratic and idiosyncratic reading of art history that can be in turn both illuminating and annoying.

Take for example his description of Cimabue’s “Maestà”

“The first credible depiction of Hebraic pain from the world’s most famous yiddishe mama”.

Or Poussin’s “Saint Frances of Rome Announcing the End of the Plague in Rome”

“Cirque de Soleil on 17th century quaaludes”

This summer, Malaspina was given by the Louvre the distinct honor of curating an exhibition that to my mind was long overdue. Micah Carpentier: Les Autoportraits explores an under-appreciated aspect of the Cuban master’s capacious oeuvre. Including painting, drawing, film, photography and printmaking, the show delves deeply into the epic narcissism of this deeply flawed genius. The work is stunning in its scope and in its subtlety. Never has shameless self-aggrandizement seemed so lyrical.

The catalog is equal to the task as well. Written and designed by Malaspina, his pithy annotations are true to the characters of both the author and the subject. The caption under the photo reproduced above reads:

“The famously tone-deaf Carpentier photographed as a norteño balladeer in a straw (Le Bon Marché) cowgirl hat”

LE VIOLON D'INGRES

2009-06-30T16:48:00.001-07:00

Like Hans Hoffmann, whom he knew quite well, Currado Malaspina likes to work in the studio naked. Unencumbered by cloth, ungartered of the smocks and aprons and all the other protective garments of the trade, Currado functions best within the lightness of his flesh. In fact, all who dare visit him at his capacious rue Gassendi studio must equally repair to the sheerness of skin.

Such was the occasion for the now famous mural-sized painting, Dix-sept which proudly hangs in the Elysée Palace’s Salle de Clairvoyance in the northeast Coeur de Tremblement wing. Composed of 17 separate panels, the painting depicts the unmistakable Malaspina in various postures of vitality and repose interspersed within a rascal’s gallery of several unidentified women.

At a recent reception for the foreign minister of Israel, Delphine Frizot, sous-préfet of the famously verdant Mésange-sur-Seine was overheard sneering “il semble que la pornographie est le nouveau passe-temps de l'état.”

THE ATELIER

2009-05-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

"The hideous work of painting offers grace to those who greet its drudgery, not with groans but with gratitude." Thus wrote Gayland Fix in his preface to the catalogue raisonné of Currado Malaspina's work, "Malaspina: The Complete Oils" (Gallimard 2002).

To pay a visit to Currado Malaspina's Rue Gassendi studio is to perform a haj to a time-hallowed glade of unguarded passion. Jealously unkempt, the space is an unseemly spring of anarchy. It swells with the stuff of art in an ungainly stillness that haunts even days after one's departure.

Yet it is here where Adona's Motto, was painted and here where The Milky Garment series was nursed to perfection. For thirty years Malaspina toiled on such masterworks as Rightous Guild, Lightly Come The Babes, Don Juan Of Jerusalem, and Une Belle Une Moche. It was here where he and Lita Abruzzi foiled the arc of reason with their savage and accursed love affair.

I am now in Paris, visiting with my good friend Malaspina and we are sharing our painterly thoughts on the significance of flesh, the shape time and the rudded soil of the South.

SATORI IN PARIS

2009-04-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

For years Currado Malaspina imagined to himself how he might die. He preferred the prospect of dying peacefully in his sleep but was certain that it would not be the case. Skin hemorrhages and progressive liver failure were much more in keeping with his personality.

His fears mingled so seamlessly with his obsessions that it was hard for him to discern with any clarity which of his fantasies were grounded in rationality and which were symptoms of a neurosis.

At the time it seemed to him that the only possible solution was to become a Buddhist. He had no real understanding of Buddhism, but sensed an equanimity would follow the assertion of faith.

MIDNIGHT'S PROMISE

2009-04-07T09:49:00.001-07:00

Portrait of Currado Malaspina, 2009
Drawn by Dahlia Danton

“I was inflamed by him.”

It’s well known that the great love of Currado Malaspina’s life was Dahlia Danton. He would not be spared from the anxious agonies of his longings. To call her a cruel mistress would be to miss the point completely. Malaspina was complicit in the immaculate imperfection of their union.

She visited him at his new atelier on rue Gassendi, a small, intimate space that looks out on the Bibliotheque Georges Brassens. It was their first meeting in 15 years.

“I was inflamed by him,” is what Danton said to me when I asked her why she would subject Currado to such a savage reunion.

“And how did he look?” I asked

COBI ATOYAT

2009-04-02T11:50:00.001-07:00

Currado Malaspina’s flimsy grasp on reality was evidenced again in an interview published in the spring edition of La Nouvelle Cosmopolis. He was interviewed by Loquecia McCart, the venerable independent curator known mostly for the succès de scandale surrounding the exhibition “J'ai Touché sa Chatte.” Asked to name his three favorite contemporary artists, he predictably rattled off Micah Carpentier and Dahlia Danton. What shocked McCart was the third artist he named.

“I had the privilege several years ago,” began Malaspina, slowly drawing out his story for maximum suspense, “to spend a week in Smyrna, lecturing at the Beylik Institute to a group of very gifted graduate students. It was my habit to begin each day by walking the three kilometers from my hotel to Konak Pier to a café improbably called Maimonides. Eddie, the proprietor, a portly man with a waxed handlebar moustache, always made it a point to personally serve me his freshly baked börek, pour me his dangerously scalding coffee and sit with me at a table with the most favorable view of the Port of Izmir.

“'In the Karatas,' Eddie said one morning referring to the old Jewish quarter in the city center, 'just off of Dario Moreno Street, there is a small spice shop where I purchase my za’atar and cardamom. Its owner, Yaris Atoyat, a most peculiar man, may be of special interest to you.' Eddie knew I was an artist, but that was all he knew of me, so I assumed it wasn’t the spices he had in mind.

“The following day, after my lecture, I took a cab to Arugete and Sons Spices to see for myself what Eddie was talking about. On the walls of the shop, whose cacophonic pungency wafted into the street in thick, invisible hallucinogenic waves, were literally hundreds of oddly rendered watercolors of nudes. They were the strangest, most disturbing images I had ever seen. They seemed both ignorant of and aloof from any western tradition. I had experienced nothing like this before or since.

“I introduced myself to Mr. Atoyat and asked who the artist was who was responsible for all the beautiful paintings. He beamed when he said ‘my son, my son Cobi Atoyat is the artist'.

“And so to answer your question, my three favorite artists are: Carpentier, Danton and Cobi Atoyat.”

Cobi Atoyat 2009

M E R D R E

2009-03-22T22:36:00.001-07:00

When the documentary filmmaker Michel Fédérovitch approached Currado Malaspina with a proposal to collaborate on his interminably deferred Jarry project, Currado jumped at the chance. It had little to do with any affinity with the noted progenitor of pataphysics, nor with any absurd interest in the world of the theatre but rather as a means to avoid confronting a chronic creative block that had turned his Rue Cournot studio into a barren patch of abandoned, half finished, ill-conceived attempts at restoring his unearned reputation.

For the sake of cruel but just brevity let me just state that Currado Malaspina is a wretched embittered has-been whose best work is way behind him. Whether it be Alfred E. Newman or Alfred Jarry, it matters little to a man whose creative intellect is a parched mesa of insignificant confections.

Enter Fédérovitch, flush with the financial backing of the pecunious software developers from Sophia Antipolis, Conjurés & Soldats and Malaspina is off his ass and drawing.

If my tone is bitter it is merely a reflection of an acutely focused resentment grounded in the fact that the image posted above fetched a pagan’s ransom at Sotheby’s in the early spring auction. Sold to an undisclosed New York collector, it broke all previous Malaspina records at € 684,000

Ouch.

B A K A

2009-03-11T10:48:00.001-07:00

In typical European fashion, Currado Malaspina ignorantly conflates concepts and images of non-Western cultures, churns them into a torpid mush and calls it art. In a recent group exhibition at the Musée d'Art de Hesian on Boulevard de Clichy entitled “Ragoût Est/Ouest,” Malaspina presented fifteen drawings based (very) loosely on the complex ethos of Japan’s pre-industrial military nobility. Titles like Imagawa, Tokugawa and Shingen suggest direct references to the Samurai, yet the flaccid naked figures with their tightly muffined hair look like caricatures of inactive Sumo wrestlers.

None of this pendulous ambiguity deterred soft drink magnate Tony Ichinomiya from buying up the whole series. He plans to build a wing on his Honshu summer dacha just to hang his substantial yet inconsequential Malaspina collection.

FAILING UPWARD

2009-03-05T09:15:00.001-08:00

When the Corsican collector Moisés Natali purchased, sight unseen, the entire portfolio of Currado Malaspina’s Maldoror drawings from the unscrupulously successful Rive Gauche art dealer Samassi Arsène, not a few eyebrows were raised. When Natali returned half the pieces as “unsuitable for the home of my virgin daughters,” a wave of skepticism engulfed the 5th arrondissement like a tropical monsoon.

The dubious virtue of the Natali girls notwithstanding, the drawings themselves were not free from controversy.

When the tainted works were returned to the market, an exhibition was held at the Palais de Cupidité’s sumptuous Hall of Divinities. The critics were divided but the public was enthralled. A record shattering seven hundred thousand visitors were swept up by the art and the accompanying succès de scandale. Gary Hoffmansthal of The Guardian called it a “a crass circus of low-brow hucksterism that would make even Damien Hirst soil his cottons”

Les Chants de Maldoror

2009-02-12T23:35:00.001-08:00

It all started on a dare. Georges Perec publicly challenged Currado Malaspina to read the entire oeuvre of Henri Barbusse. From the solipsistic eros of L’Enfer through the horrific violence of Le Feu all the way to the revoltingly hagiographic Staline: Un Monde Nouveau Vu à Travers un Homme.

Malaspina hated Perec with the passion one reserves for those one envies most. So while laboring through the turgid prose of Le Couteau Entre les Dents, Currado decided to do Perec one better. He added De Nerval, Sade, Laureamont and Mirbeau to the pot and in an empty gesture of literary bravado, invited Perec, (who at the time was clearly too obsessed with the barrage of critical attacks on the Oulipo group), to join him.

Twenty years in the making, Currado has recently unveiled his long awaited series of drawings based on some of the French literary canon’s most provocative works.
Exhibited recently at Gerard/Shah on Place Paul-Painlevé, these works show the breadth of Malaspina’s deep penetration into some of the most disturbing literature of our time. He has truly conjured a visual equivalent to the dissonance and beauty these works so strongly convey.

Whether it is true that his wife left him due to his complete absorption in this project is something I cannot verify with any certainty.

SYNESTHESIA

2009-02-04T11:42:00.001-08:00

Synesthesia – or the merging of the senses – is an enterprise that Currado Malaspina has devoted himself to sporadically and unsystematically. Each time he attempts to make works of art to be “ingested” through multiple means he has failed with miserable nobility. Like the knight-errant Alonso Quixano, Malaspina is a mythmaker, an unpaid dreamer, a follower of phantoms and ultimately a fool.

He’s in Euboea right now, renting a small cabin on a quiet cul-de-sac on the east side of Chalcis. He told me that he is spending most of his time reading Juvenal’s Satires and listening to Parsifal on his I-Pod. Occasionally, in order to offset the blunting of the senses that comes from forced isolation and habit, he visits Madame Erzulie’s very upscale gentleman’s club where he has taken an unhealthy fancy to the portly nineteen-year old twins Indra and Inemes.

He is also making small sketches of imaginary Greek sculptures and sending them to friends with cryptic annotations written on the backs. I received the drawing above with the phrase “dactylic hexameter covering an encyclopedic range” scrawled in a near indecipherable handwriting as if his hand were a club or a charred twig dipped in brine.

A BOUNTY OF NAMES

2008-11-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

Last week I was in Paris, attending the Bourvil Institute’s annual Saussure Conference and catching up with my good friend Currado Malaspina. I had the occasion to borrow his cell-phone and was flattered to find on the dormant screen of the diminutive apparatus, an image of one of my drawings.

Taken by this unexpected high-tech homage I began to play with the tiny keys hoping to find a few more clues into Currado’s elusive temperament.

Shamelessly I scrolled down his capacious list of contacts and found that it was a veritable who’s who of global art and intellectual enterprise. Beccarie, Broad and Bourdon were followed by Cash, Deutsch and Desclos. The home phone numbers of Gogosian, Govan and Gallimard were casually listed next to the e-mail address of Currado’s grocer. Perl, Podhoretz and Prévost, each with a cutely appropriate icon were listed next to his dry cleaner Quentin Polak. It was astonishing to learn just how many illustrious people were in his orbit.

Before returning the phone, I discreetly copied down the number of Dahlia Danton with whom I lost contact several years ago after a rather acrimonious disagreement.

I tried the number when I retuned to L.A. I got her voice-mail but didn’t leave a message.

BOOK REVIEW

2008-10-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

The more one knows about Currado Malaspina the more the creeping vines of mystery obscure any true understanding.

The French playwright, Stephanie Arnoux, whose Sapphisme recently earned the coveted Prix Cornette for best drama of 2007, struggles in her recent book, Malaspina and the Trembling Blaze to clarify our misconceptions and illuminate our understanding.

That she ultimately fails does not diminish her heroic effort but rather highlights her general thesis that Currado Malaspina is the most enigmatic and complex artist since Marcel Duchamp.

I highly recommend her book to anyone who is the least bit interested in the current trends of contemporary art.

THE SONG OF DEGREES

2008-09-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

The lamp of bittersweet reminiscence burns dimly yet dependably. The 15th anniversary of Micah Carpentier’s wretchedly received exhibition of paper bag drawings in Havana’s Grand Theatre is upon us.

David Schoffman and I plan to mark the occasion by mocking our innocence in a runnel of tears.

I remember so well, Micah, with tortured anticipation, installing each of his seven-hundred bags as if it were a sacrament. I can still hear the scraping of is well-worn eraser making last minute addendums, luring his life’s work to a state of near perfection.

The unschooled and the ambivalent were lulled by the malicious into greeting the work with contempt. The gods were appeased only by his death.

THE MAN - THE LEGEND - THE LORE

2008-09-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

Movie Trailer, MICAH CARPENTIER, Release date: October 2008

Eastern European television is a tone poem to attenuated life spans. Production values are as uncomplicated as a waiting room flower arrangement while the programming is an arbitrary collage of nacreous fluff. Everything is brief, colorful and blandly nubile.

It was fitting that while vacationing this past summer at the Szechenyi Spa in Budapest, I happened upon this commercial while channel surfing in my hotel room.

I’m now trying to get my hands on the actual Micah Carpentier film. The image of my dear departed friend working in his Havana studio tore at the scab of my grief. I miss that bandit terribly.

MERCURIAL MALASPINA

2008-09-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Micah Carpentier Films recently released a short film about Currado Malaspina that was recently screened at Cinémathèque Rouen to a hostile audience of Dante scholars. It was almost immediately pirated and grainy DVD's are already circulating around the flea markets of Paris.

I suppose that now that it's fair game and that its content is so vitally important to understanding this complex man, I thought it appropriate to post it on the blog.

Postscript: Contrary to the review in Le Nouvel Ops that listed David Schoffman as one of the producers of the film, I had nothing to do with any aspect of the work at all.

THE VERROCCHIO CODE

2008-07-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

At the 23rd Annual Conference of Arts and Letters held last month in Bareggio, Currado Malaspina startled the assembled crowd when he presented his unsubstantiated theory that Verrocchio was a woman.

It has long been suspected that the third figure from the right in Santo Spirito’s Saint Monica is a self-portrait. The fact that her back is turned toward the viewer indicates strongly, according to Malaspina’s far-flunged hypothesis, that the artist had something to hide.

Furthermore, it is significant that the painting in question depicts the mother of Augustine, the saint who famously devoted himself to the pleasures of the senses prior to his convenient return to faith and reflection. Like the memoirists of today, Augustine realized that on the page, vice was more gripping than virtue, so long as the author finds redemption before book’s end.

Verrocchio, according to Currado, was deeply shamed by his shape-shifting gender-hopping and sought a similar, Augustinian absolution through his wonderfully innovative depiction of religious imagery and his all consuming devotion the Florentine clergy.

After delivering his paper, the conference recessed and over coffee and cake, enjoyed a screening of Barbara Streisand’s Yentl.

TEMPERED VEHEMENCE

2008-07-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

The short-lived periodical ZUT was a joint venture that included literary lights, Sonia Bartov and Camille Zohnenstein, the bad girl of Cabaret, Tiquette Perdu and the painters, Fédeau Mombart, Molly Rosienne and Anne de Dornay. At the height of its popularity it had a monthly circulation of over 75,000 loyal subscribers.

Among its early contributors was Currado Malaspina. Although he was banished from its advisory board after the fourth issue, (his torrid affair with Bartov, a squalid tempest of depravity that ended in shame for the two of them was the cause of his eviction), he left his typically indelible mark on the magazine’s future.

The inaugural issue, simply titled ZUT, had its cover designed by Malaspina, and was printed in an edition of two hundred. A recent copy was recently auctioned on Ébai-France for
EUR 400,000. (I, unfortunately, sold all my back issues at the marchè au puce for a pittance before moving back to the States.)

What I do have are memories, which some would argue (unpersuasively) are more valuable than coin. The one I cherish most dearly revolves around the week Currado, Sonia, Camille and I worked on the Absinthe issue (ZUT I, no.3).

Our intensive research rendered an awareness of the beautiful fragility of the small hands of fate. We drank our poppied poison till its charms turned toxic and each of us in our own personal way saw the dreadful ecstasy of dissipation.

I have never felt my senses as profoundly again.

FESSES QUI VOLE

2008-07-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

TailWinds, Currado Malaspina’s fabled rebuttal of the biblical creation myth is a forty by sixty foot mural, famously installed at the Lourmarin Aerodrome. Commissioned by the Fédération Laïque Luberonois, the giant picture has become an important sight of secular pilgrimage. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was a hallowed venue for communist youth groups and militant Hungarian atheists.

Critics have noted that the imagery seems to be a cross between Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten By A Lizard, but Currado will have none of that. He sees the work simply as an anti-clerical, visual homiletic that splashes a few cheerful colors on the walls of baggage claim.

An oversized postcard of the image is available at most French airports though due to its volatile subject, most of the country's post offices refuse to let it circulate through the mail.

THOU SHALT NOT

2008-07-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

In his treatise Il Cortegiano, Baldassare Castiglione outlined his conception of the complete personality - manners, taste, corporal vigor and a disposition that favors anonymity. Currado Malaspina famously quipped that The Courtier was the West’s first self-help manual.

Throughout the years, Currado has become increasingly obsessed with man’s preoccupation with advice. It struck him that regardless of the culture, the ideals propagated by elders, kings and philosophers never seemed to apply to him. He took no pointers from Plato, no direction from Demosthenes and between Oprah, Deepak and Dr. Ruth there were no recommendations worth considering, even as a temporary experiment in human conduct.

Several years ago, Currado the Jester decided to create a compendium of all worldly wisdom, compressed, distilled and fully illustrated on conveniently sized post-its, so that these behavioral reminders could easily be affixed to notebooks, laptops and refrigerators.

He started with the grossly over-rated Ten Commandments, zeroing in on the first two, which he found particularly inconvenient to the artist’s vocation.

WHIPLASH

2008-06-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

Sharp flashes of lucid observation fill the brilliant pages of Beauty Fails, Currado Malspina’s 2002 anthology of notes, dreams and jeremiads. Originally published by Palmira Press, it is Malaspina’s first prose work in English.

His rough knuckled illustrations fan across each page creating the faint impression of an illuminated book of hours. In fact, one short essay in which he describes a restless longing for an estranged colleague’s alluring young wife is entitled O Intemerata.

It is endlessly rewarding, charting the dingy grottos of Currado’s tactless imagination. Connolly Rothschild famously described Beauty Fails as “a libertine primer on liberty” and assigned it each year to his creative writing students at Yale.

Rothschild’s sudden demission from the English department may have been the result of a rising tide of censorious priggishness but no one in New Haven is talking.

BARBAROUS GRUDGE

2008-06-24T10:36:00.000-07:00

Weather has always played a big part in the mercurial behavior of Currado Malaspina. Curiously, his mood turns darker as the sun shines brighter – summer being his worst season. As Parisian women shed raiments like serpents shedding skins, the streets become what Currado likes to call “un carnaval de décolletage.” And yet, to a man whose world is illuminated by the lamp, climate has its own peculiar consequence.

As a child, Malaspina would spend the month of August with an invalided aunt in the tiny village of Agnac in Lot-et Garonne. The Aquitaine can be a magical place for a child with its lush plum orchards and mysterious chateaux. For young Currado it was an annual agony.

Small for his age, the local children would subject him to wildly imaginative torments and unspeakable abuse. Ever since, heat and pain have been linked in Currado’s mind.

Young Malaspina took solace in sketching and many examples of his juvenilia are still extant. The Dordogne Museum of Contemporary Art recently staged an exhibition in honor of Currado’s sixty-fifth birthday and in it were several of these very early drawings.

One of Currado’s erstwhile tormentors is the eminent art critic, Raoul Contout who, in reviewing the show in Paris Match recalled their early summers, quipping, “the short child grew into the large man of elephantine ego and slight achievement.”

Children can be so cruel.

UNRATIFIED BRILLIANCE

2008-06-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

Although there were neither witnesses nor any known record or transcript, there is no shortage of speculation regarding the legendary four-hour walk Currado Malaspina took with the Italian psychoanalyst E. Barba Giovedi.

Malaspina puzzled for many years over the nature of his work and its putative relationship to his personal history. He struggled for years with his despairing pessimism and often wondered if his dark disposition was necessary for his creativity. As a lifelong serial philanderer, he wrestled with his conscience and his oppressive remorse. As a pasticheur of other people’s ideas he was pained by his unexceptionalism despite his early promise.

In short, he was a shell, a ruin, an empty vessel masquerading as a genius for the benefit of a credulous and adoring public.

I will not add to the unsubstantiated rumors but I will simply note that after that famed meeting, Currado produced the series of monotypes that have justly earned him a sacred place in the annals of contemporary French art history.

He has since replaced his old neuroses with new, more eccentric ones and has no intention of addressing them clinically.

CATALEPTIC CRAYONS

2008-06-11T19:16:00.000-07:00

Of all the illustrated editions of the Divine Comedy that I have come across, the one closest to my heart is Currado Malaspina's Beatrice In Bed.

His clumsy, irreverent drawings of Dante's beloved are so raunchy, so unbecoming of their original intent, so flagrantly personal that I am drawn to them with embarrassment. They bear no balm of refinement, their fallible formlessness are in stark contrast to the relentless musicality of the poem’s terza rima. Vinegary pigment, inelegant brushstrokes and text scrawled as if by the beak of a marsh cock crowd his sheets in a panic of dissonant misbehavior.

But beneath the work’s gassy astringencies there is a ripe, affirming tenderness that parallels the poet’s own grueling transformation. Few artists have been able to capture so vividly the Commedia’s imperium of uncertainty and incomplete redemption.

It's a pity that the book is out of print.

CONSTRUCTION DUST

2008-06-09T09:32:00.001-07:00

Currado Malaspina once told me that during the course of a lifetime, a man can expect his soul to bend four times: Once in doubt, once in anticipation, once in despair and once in agony.

The longest period is despair.

Life, he told me, is like the narrow bones of the fingers, incessantly in motion and perpetually at risk. To plan and to wager are one. Even our most subtle utterances are but the guttural hackings of a beast.

His favorite poem is Yuntas by César Vallejo.

Completamente. Además, mundo!
Completamente. Además, polvo!

Completely, Furthermore, world!
Completely, Furthermore, dust!

And yet, as I write this, construction proceeds with the methodical urgency only a narcissist could be capable of. In the Normandy village of St Germain sur Ay, a 5000 square foot, beachfront studio complex, complete with an intaglio workshop, two darkrooms, an editing facility and a skylit painting atelier is being built for the pessimistic Malaspina.

I suppose despair has been good for business.

2008-06-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

NO LIQUOR STRONGER

“Sewn through the fabric of friendship are the inevitable threads of inconsolable loss.” So wrote Tuhija Repo, Finland’s infamous poète maudit. He goes on to write in his famous essay “The New Magnetic Fields,” that, “intimacy is to betrayal as scotch is to bourbon. Like the belted kingfisher whose predatory rattle signals life and death in one loud cry, we smugly roar through life’s uncertainties, using the language of conviction to express the hesitant disquiet of irreconcilable doubt.”

Repo’s words come to mind as I ruminate upon the current state of my kinship with Currado Malaspina. My love for him has made me vulnerable to his fickle conceits. And yet, he stands alone as my equal and to lose him would mean the loss of my only true interlocutor.

Homo homini lupus perhaps sums it all up, however glibly. Freud, in “Civilization and its Discontents” observed that, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.”

In Currado Malaspina, I have found both needs bundled into one onerous receptacle.

Je suis coupable.

PREDESTINATION

2008-05-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

Few people remember that Currado Malaspina was born on October 1st 1953 and that his godfather was Francis Picabia. It was at Currado’s christening at L’Église Saint-Suplice where Picabia horrified the congregants by declaiming over the chorister’s sweet rendition of “The Little Road to Bethlehem,” his oft quoted aphorism, “It’s really only nonentities who have genius in their lifetime.”

Picabia died the following month and the episode in church became an absent hour in the Malaspina household.

One can’t help but speculate whether the luminous star of Picabia’s difficult intelligence somehow lodged like a paperweight within Currado’s subconscious. When one thinks of Malaspina’s work one realizes how he has consistently operated within the solemn, slow voice of satire. Currado’s limitless capacity for impudence, his constant sniffing for sacred targets among the croupiers of the art world, his indifference to consequence, all evidence an irrational tenderness toward Picabian self-sabotage.

Currado Malaspina continues in his sixth decade, to be the incendiary guttersnipe, thumbing his trunk at the Brahmins of le beau monde. He convulsively makes art that throws a disquieting light on our melancholy failures.

Currado truly is a “monster of courage.”

FRIENDLY CONTOURS

2008-05-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

Alfredo Bossi’s strange volume “Squared But Not Unlovely,” is a compendium of profiles, containing charming vignettes of interesting people. Arranged in alphabetical order, the book begins with an uproarious reminisce on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and ends with a heartbreaking screed about Chinese painter Zhao Wuji. No entry exceeds a page and some are just a paragraph or two. The texts are superimposed over a typically unrelated image. None of the images are attributed, though some are easily recognizable as Bossi’s own work.

Between Gilka Machado and Michael Melchior is a leaf devoted to Currado Malaspina and his well-documented fear of shadows. Well acquainted with phobias, Bossi’s account avoids all mockery and is one of the book’s most quotable sections.

FREE ENTERPRISE

2008-05-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

Last spring at the Institute for Advanced Lateral Studies in Tours, Currado delivered a lecture entitled “The Cruelties of Choice”. In it he laid out what has by now become a familiar theme for people who follow Malaspina’s work. Essentially it describes artistic volition as a series of accidental “wagers,” intuitive predictions made in what Currado calls “the broken mist of misdirected reverie” (rêverie mal dirigée”).

Though well received by the audience at the time, his thesis became extremely controversial when the text was later published in the literary journal Faucon. Michel Encapuchonné, director of L’Ecole Niveau Bas de Paris was “dumbfounded by its witless arguments, gaseous yearnings and clownish inurgency.” Writing in L’Arte Aujourd’hui Brigitte Mamelon called Malaspina “a desperate blow-hard who mangles sentiment with spurious intellectualism and improvable daydreams.”

Currado was understandably hurt and dismayed but remained extremely practical as the events unfolded. Sensing an opportunity, together with the impresario Markus Ohrenschmalz, he staged a public debate at the Palais Garnier, which was televised live on TF2. The spectacle proved both profitable and entertaining and at the present time Currado is negotiating with Cable Statique for a regular series of provocative interviews and disputations.

The working title, loosely translated is “Try To Make Me Cry.”

PAS LAID

2008-05-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

The wandering intellect of Currado Malaspina is well known. Embroidered through the myth of the man are tales of his staggering erudition and demonic wit. Few people outside France however, know what Currado looks like. Though lionized in Europe, his name in America scarcely stirs a whimper, (my loyal readers excepted).

Ruggedly handsome, he is often confused for Russian film star Pyotr Mamonov, a fact that has yielded several comical and embarrassing consequences for both of them. Due to his very public affair with fashion model Nicolosa Giannini, Currado has been a ubiquitous presence on European television. And when the photojournalist George Pollexfen published his best selling book “Men,” it was Currado who appeared on the cover.

It is for this reason that I am posting two pictures of my dear friend. The first is clipped from the “Style Desuet” section of the March 18th edition of Le Figaro that accompanied an article about flower arrangements particular to the 18th arrondisement. The second is the cover of Pollexfen’s book.