HAGIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 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

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

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

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 (Bibliothèque VanDido, Ghent)

Régis Kyombé, 1974 (Private collection)

WHO WAS THAT WOMAN?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 "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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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HOMO LUDENS

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

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

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

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?