ACCOUNTING

A wet glittering sun sizzles upon the gravel road that leads to Currado Malaspina's summer studio in Languedoc-Roussillon. Situated about three kilometers west of the huge salt-water swamp of Camargue, it is not unusual to spot one of the many beautiful cliff birds that are indigenous to the area.

The garden behind Currado Malaspina's Languedoc-Roussillon studio. 2013

For Currado, summer begins in April and ends sometime in late June when he cedes his little portion of paradise to foreign tourists, typically Germans, ready to spend upwards of €1500 a week for the privilege of renting his cozy two bedroom cottage.

Till then, he spends his time reading the Georgics, grilling gamey meats and painting small, insignificant watercolors on scraps of discarded drawing paper.

Untitled watercolor, Currado Malaspina, 2013

For my good friend Currado, the season is one glorious, languorous, unending day. His pictures, usually no larger than the size of a man's palm, command in the rancorous Parisian art market the decidedly immodest sum of €7500.

For my good friend Currado Malaspina, profit is never poisoned by the brunt of onerous exertion.
 

THE SPARK THAT FORMALLY FLARED

 In 1998, my well-traveled friend Currado Malaspina was commissioned by Arvindah Rei to provide a comprehensive graphic guide to the Kama Sutra. Reading the text sutra by sutra, he was struck by its eerie familiarity. 

Though nominally a Catholic, Currado explained to Arvindah, that he suddenly realized he had "been a devout Hindu all these years."

"Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha are the four horses of my personal apocalypse," suggesting, I think, that these post-Vedic ideals were somewhat incongruent with his dissipated French, urban way of life.

 For the past 15 years Malaspina has been engaged in a pyrrhic struggle to assimilate East with West. All the while, he has been slowly and methodically reconfiguring his original vision of this seminal Sanskrit text. Pulling apart, creaking loose and tunneling through, Currado has eliminated his earlier innocence in favor of a patchwork of tortured ambiguity. 

What the unholy spirit has dispensed will be on view next month in a much anticipated, off-season exhibition in Paris's 6th arrondissement.

As a dark shadow lengthens over his earlier work and before the show opens, I think it is appropriate to remember that sweet and buoyant  radiance that characterized the younger version of Currado.

Arvindah Rei has since passed and the State of Tamil Nadu has turned his palatial home into a national museum. For ardent fans of Malaspina, a pilgrimage to Chennai is a must.

 

The work of Currado Malaspina permanently installed in the Arvindah Rei Museum, Chennai

CONTRE LE FROID ENNUYEUX

Like many northern Europeans, my dear friend Currado Malaspina looks south for climatic relief during the long, bitter winter months. "Paris is the color of a faded tourniquet and I'm tired of the cold monotony," was how he put it to me in a recent email. This April has been especially cruel prompting my peripatetic colleague to flee to El Jadida on the north coast of Morocco where Orson Wells famously filmed his iconic film, Othello.

El Jadida Morocco

Like Wells, Currado fashions himself as something of an outlaw, an iconoclast and a dissident genius who stands aloof and alone beyond the pale of easy comprehension.

This might explain why he prefers to keep the paintings he holds most dear, closeted behind a veil of exaggerated secrecy. You see, when Currado is on vacation, (which is often) he loves to paint landscapes. Yes, Currado Giulo Malaspina, blasphemous shatterer of the sacred vessels of modernism has a hidden passion for the plein-air.

Almond Trees in Arles, Oil on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2009 (Collection of David Schoffman)

So while I wish him a productive and recuperative trip, I know that he is anxiously struggling to somehow emerge from within the shadows of Delacroix, Renoir, Matisse, Clore and all the other great artists who found inspiration on the North African coast.

Currado Malaspina, Mazagan Beach, Morocco, 2013

Palimpseste: The Creation Myth

It all started innocently enough when an ecclectic group of French artists and intellectuals gathered around a table the size of a small aircraft carrier. It was 1999 and the city of Paris was celebrating la fête de Pâques. The generous art patrons Alois and Brigitte Ormontagne were hosting their annual seder de Pessach for about 65 of their most intimate friends. Among the guests were Ludovic Halévy, Henri Blowitz, Alponse Halimi and his wife Ysmin, the Derridas, Zazie Modiano, Nathalie Artem, Solange Dreyfus-Meyer and my good, catholic friend Currado Malaspina.

Amid teeming platters of legumbres yenos de karne, arroz de sabato, berenjenas ahobadas, carpe à la juive (sometimes known as gefilte fish) and gallons of respectable Galilean wine, this pack of European intellectual luminaries held forth on subjects both sacred and profane. Currado was particularly taken by the participation of the children - the poet Anouk Atata's five year old daughter Chantalle recited the four questions without a flaw - and by the exegetical drama that was sustained throughout the interminable meal.

By the time they poured the ritual 16th glass of wine (Currado was under the mistaken impression that the ceremony demanded four cups but he was assured by his hosts that any multiple thereof was fine), most of the participants were pretty giddy and some were even advocating the Pharaoh's  position in the bible's most famous labor dispute.  

When former Algerian Foreign Minister Quentin Zhoof spilled half his 1984 Yatir Tishbi syrah over Alois' Haggadah, everyone took it as a signal to bring the festivities to a close. But Currado, (who by the way, does not drink), saw in this clumsy mishap a wonderful artistic opportunity. The wine-stained pages with their arcane typography and indecipherable alphabet struck him as an object of remarkable beauty. He insisted to his hosts that if he were allowed to take this brittle 19th century volume back to his studio he would delicately restore to its original state. This holy book had been brought to Paris from Bukovina by Ormontagne père in 1938 and was Alois' only link to a side of his family that perished during the War. He was nervous but grateful by Malaspina's thoughtful offer. 

Currado never did get around to returning the book and Ormontagne was too much of a gentleman to demand its repatriation. I heard that Malaspina cut it up and used its pages as drawing paper. Some even suggested that he sold it to a collector of rare books in New York who subsequently donated it to a religious library in Jerusalem.

Whatever the truth is, one thing is clear:

Palimpseste was born!

Palimpseste II no.4, Currado Malaspina, 2002

Palimpseste II no.3, Currado Malaspina, 2002

   

AN UNLIKELY ALLIANCE

 

 

Art critic Spark Boon and Currado Malaspina, Cannes, 2013

Sullen and desultory, my crisis stricken friend Currado Malaspina recently submitted to an extensive interview with the young New York curator and art critic, Spark Boon.

Boon, it seems, has made a name for himself as a repentant disciple of deconstructive intertextuality. His master's thesis at CalArts, Bakhtin, Barthes, Caselli and the new Dialogic Drawing was published by Stopped Clock Press with the much less ponderous title: Plagiarism: A Love Story. His position at the time was that the physical properties of paper inevitably linked all graphic material into one hypertextual ecosystem. As such, Michelangelo's drawings are the aesthetic equivalent to a driver's license, a child's notebook or a lottery ticket. It was a stirring piece of scholarship and it quickly earned Boon the reputation of a fulgent, up and coming public intellectual.

The story goes that Boon's Road to Damascus moment came when his girlfriend enrolled him in a life drawing class at the Art Students League in order to wean him off Ritalin. He was so taken by the prolonged patience he was able to achieve while drawing that he began to devote himself almost exclusively to his newfound draftsmanship. This in turn compelled him to reevaluate his whole perspective on the post-modernist canon, turning him into a sniveling apologist for the outdated notions of beauty, craft, form and quality.

Spark Boon, charcoal and pastel on paper, 2012

This in turn, brought him to Currado.

Spark Boon's sentimental recidivism and Currado Malaspina's pathetic 20th century modernist perspective are a perfect match. They recently spent many hours together in Cannes where Currado was recuperating from eye surgery. "His fawning attention is repellant," Currado wrote to me in a recent email, "but I hear he's a big-shot ('ayant une réputation non acquises') in Brooklyn, so I figured, why not?"

Why not!? I can think of about 200 reasons!

GUILTY OF POSSESSION

My bitter friend, Currado Malaspina sizzles with contempt at the mere mention of the word propriétaire. "Dante should have reserved a special place in his infernal fantasy for the landlords, bankers and the owners of Quick," he told me on more than one occasion. Currado has been renting his Place Paul Painlevé studio from the swindling slumlord Edvard Schchitonya for over twenty years and holds this elegent Russian émigré in delicious contempt.

Portrait of Edvard Schchitonya, watercolor and pastel on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2011

Currado once confided in me that to soothe himself into sleep he imagines poor Edvard in his ubiquitous soft yarn Norwegian turtleneck ski sweater writhing in a puddle of his own vomit screaming "au secours nom de dieu au secours!"

What riles Currado the most is that Schchitonya's avarice exceeds even the wretched, contemptible but somehow acceptable norm. His voracious cupidity surpasses even the tolerated levels of craven profiteering that we have grown so accustomed to in this Olympian age of greed. He seeks not only gain and surfeit but sincerely finds a perverse sense of accomplishment in the suffering of others. 

Case in point, Sandrine Pijnenburg, Currado's next-door neighbor.

Sandrine Pijnenburg, Paris 20013

  Known by everyone in the neighborhood as Sabtoosh (Sandrine's oddly appropriate diminutive of uncertain provenance), Pijnenburg has lived in the building since 1969 when it was still owned by the French-Algerian playwright Aggassi Hanasi. When Hanasi died the building was sold by his son Yehuda to a shill real estate development company called Rvota owned by the Russian oligarch Sergei Turgenev. Somehow, through machinations far too byzantine for Currado's math deficient mind to comprehend, in 1993 his landlord became Schchitonya.

Now, through the obscure Napoleonic "Droit de l'asile" a law that is invoked in France about as frequently as the law prohibiting women from wearing pants, Schchitonya is evicting his tenents in order to make the flats available as tax shelters for his Moscovite business partners.

Needless to say, Sabtoosh is none too pleased. According to Currado, Schchitonya has offered to buy out the 90 year grandmother for 20,000 euro, barely enough to afford a squalorous one-bedroom, rat infested tenement in some affronted suburb like Saint-Denis. She flatly refuses and is now embroiled in a bitter lawsuit that is eroding her life savings like an arctic glacier.

And why isn't Currado vulnerable to the rapacious Russian's appetite for profit? Why does he remain undisturbed in his bohemian atelier?

It's all in the family.

 Edvard Schchitonya is married to Malaspina's little sister Emelie. 

Emelie and Edvard Schichitonya on their honeymoon in St. Petersburg, 1998

   

CRITICAL CITADEL

Ever the puckish provocateur, my good friend Currado Malaspina has entered the cauldron of contentious Middle East politics. In the spirit of Honoré Daumier, he has recently published a series of uproariously scathing cartoons in the British satirical magazine The Toasty Baker.

Most of the drawings are unsuitable for reproduction - there is a generous sampling of dangling ankle spankers, wilted mamillae and detonated feculence - but the one that has gotten the most attention happens to be the most Orphic.

And the most priapic.

AN OPEN (AND ILLUSTRATED) LETTER TO RELIGIOUS PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

My insane friend Currado Malaspina has taken on a new cause. In keeping with the French anti-clerical tradition he has taken it upon himself to militantly address the global religious community. 

"Ca me fait chier," is how he put it to me in a recent phone call. "I've had it ... aaa hijo puta de mierda capullo gilipollas imbecil ... I'm simply fed up!" (As some of you may already know, Currado can be fluently profane in about a dozen languages).

He recently published this open letter in the French weekly La Langue Inquiet. The clumsy translation is mine.

To whom it may so urgently concern,

Shut up! Faites taire! Siete zitto!

For once, try to be still and listen!

Had it ever occurred to you that you may be in error? (Who am I kidding? Of course not). Has it crossed your collective minds that maybe, just maybe, your understanding of the universe is to a certain degree flawed? Could it be conceivable that God has a somewhat different take on things than you do?

For instance, let's assume, just for fun, that there is a god (and by the way, how did such a half-baked notion such as monotheism gain such traction?) and that this god is all-knowing and all ... hell, I don't know ... all .... uhm ... merde!!! ... let's just say that he is really really nice and understanding, sort of like the math teacher you had in high school who wasn't married and who took a keen interest in you and made you feel special even though your other teachers thought you were a wise-ass. And this all-knowing, really really nice god watches over everything and loves everybody.

Tell me this, religious people: Why does he love some people more than others? Why does he play favorites and grants the French a 35 hour work week and a full month paid vacation each year but every so often he decides to flood the Ganges, the last time in 1998 where 1000 people were killed and over 30 million (yes, I said million!) were left homeless.

And what's up with all this gay bashing. Literally. As in "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)

 Oh, and can I get an apology for the Crusades, yes, all of them, I - IX, but with special emphasis on Number Two which was particularly brutal on the Jews of my native France.

Listen up religious people, nothing good has ever originated with faith. 

The Ten Commandments you say?
 Really!? 

Like I need a document to tell me that killing is wrong? I think I figured that one out on my own. And how about the first, most famous commandment, "Do not have any gods before Me?" Hey god ... why so insecure? And #2, "Thou shalt not make any graven images?" As you know, I am Currado Malaspina, one of The Republic's most famous artists and for me Commandment number 2 is just plain BAD FOR BUSINESS!

And let's not even get into the Middle East, after all, if I say the wrong thing or for that matter even if I say the right thing but in the wrong way I may invite one of those lovely fatwas and frankly, I can't afford a bodyguard.

But while I'm in the neighborhood, explain to me how that wonderful epic poem known as the Old Testament doubles as a real estate document?  Its like replacing your GPS with a copy of Homer's Odyssey!

 And to my good friends across the ocean: de Tocqueville wouldn't recognize the place! The prideful ignorance of your religious right wing would be funny if not for its dire implications on the future health of our shared planet. How does a country which prides itself on its great colleges and universities produce political leaders with such contempt for science? Not since the days of Giordano Bruno has reason and empiricism been under such siege. I wish you luck, America.

I was standing beside a soft spoken and frail Henri Matisse when the art historian Jack Flam asked him if he believed in god. "Yes" he answered, "when I work ... I sense myself helped immensely by someone who makes me do things that surpass myself."

Some people, when they speak to god, go out into the world strapped in a suicide vest.

Others do this.

Best regards,

Currado Malaspina

LESBIA

Currado Malaspina"s work table, Rue Bernoulli studio, 2012

My aging friend Currado Malaspina is the perpetual student. Works left derelict for years are constantly being retrieved from moldy flat files and subjected to relentless reworkings, innovative re-imaginings and contemporary re-contextualization.

Revisiting the prior ports of personal embarkation is a dangerous game rife with regret, recrimination and cruel self-mocking melancholy. Currado, working within the silent womb of his Rue Bernoulli studio suffers none of these afflictions. To his great credit Malaspina sees the atelier as nothing but a provincial parish, a forgotten artery of urban artistic intercourse. In this way he can indulge in his work without the classic fatigue that his younger contemporaries suffer from with their self-imposed pressure to constantly provoke the "shock of the new." Currado has already picked the public's pocket and he did so without the neurotic dread that hampers so many emerging artists today.

He has recently discovered the work of American expatriate artist, Faun Roberts. In his words her volatile works from the 1920's and 30's are "a veritable dark Sabbath of frenzied, over-sexed witches (un sabbat noir, plein de sorcières frénétiques et lubriques), an absolute, untamed struggle with the angels and gargoyles of European history."

Appassionato, Oil on burlap, Faun Roberts, 1923

His encounter with Roberts has rubbed Currado's muzzle in ways I have never seen before. It's like he fell through a chimney and is now soiled with a new, uncomfortable disquiet. 

"Formerly I thought that my whole life was a swollen open sore of transgression and grievance," he told me over the phone not too long ago, "now I see that I was just another fondling of le père Sevin."*

And so my good friend Currado is once again turning inward. He is trying to perfect his knowledge of artistic anatomy and is studying sumi-e brush painting with the Korean master Kim Hong-do. Time will tell what his new passionate research will yield.

He is also struggling to translate Catullus' Clodia poems into contemporary French.

*Father Jacques Sevin is the founder of the French Scouting Association

 

LIBIDINAL INTENSITIES

Currado Malaspina, Paris, 2012

My old friend, the jarringly impetuous Parisian artist Currado Malaspina has an infernal temper. Like a drummer's brush, he skirts the surface of civility until neither prayer nor plea can prevent his rage from crashing violently down.

I remember one episode in particular where a capricious remark from a young critic made the long dead dance and the musty crypts quake from the crush of Currado's reaction.

Spark Boon, a recent survivor of the CalArts graduate program was in Paris on a research grant looking for meta-narratives in Lyotard's bank statements and laundry lists. Malaspina, as a young member of the Collège international de philosophie in the 1970's knew the great French theorist and Boon contacted him to ask a few questions. 

It should be noted that Lyotard and Malaspina shared a deep and abiding mutual distrust, but young Spark Boon had no way of knowing this in advance. When he innocently inquired about Currado's thoughts on Adorno's "negative dialectics" the fine timbers of reason collapsed and an untrimmed tirade exploded like Mauna Loa.

Spark Boon, Rome, 2012

I have to say that beneath the weight of Currado's wrath, young Spark Boon handled himself admirably. He is a promising scholar and a thoughtful and original critic. I am impressed by his character and his wit.

Though I am not too impressed with his French.

Dommage ...

A TATTERED COAT UPON A STICK

My good friend Currado Malaspina is consumed by the constant cadence of his ebbing vitality. While still well within the feckless youth of old age, his certitude is less certain and his dominion considerably less dominant.

Finding neither joy nor comfort nor love in the fleeting liaisons that still furiously fill his clock, Currado marinates his misery in long, doleful letters to his few remaining friends.

His chief correspondent is the irresistibly exquisite Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.

Currado Malaspina and Dahlia Danton at the Tigres Library, Madrid, 2004

"My heart is a heretical bar fly showing little deference and less remorse. I am greedy for forgetfulness," he recently wrote from Tangiers where he still owns a villa overlooking Cape Spartel. "I long for honeyed conversation curved with lies and false hopes."
(Ms Danton has given me access to most of the letters exchanged by her and Malaspina, apparently unconcerned about betraying a confidence)

I have to say, I have little compassion for my old furtive friend. Most men his age are consigned to a life of bearish nostalgia, a sad phantom of imagined recollections of heroic lechery. Currado by contrast seems to be perpetually incanting a libidinous libretto of voluptuous celebration grounded in fact.

Currado Malaspina, 2012

 "Heaving hips and gamboling breasts," ("hanches lancinante et les seins gambadant) "are the secrets to a perfumed longevity," was how Rodin put it in his 1902 letter to Constance LeVrai. Although it is an uncertain wager reading an artist's work for biographical clues, Malaspina's recent drawings may provide a window into his mid-life preoccupations.

Could they possibly be meant as monuments of a self-professed magnificence? Or are they noiseless lamentations of impending impotence?

SOME AREA!

For all the years that I've known Currado Malaspina, I have never heard him express any interest in politics. He has never, to my knowledge, voted in any French election; never participated in any maniféstation publique; never signed his name to a petition: never boycotted, expressed solidarity, sat-in, walked-out, struck, work-stopped or stood behind a barricade. Currado is so single-mindedly devoted to his artistic enterprise that any social or political involvement requiring even the slightest commitment would be unthinkable.

Until now.

Currado Malaspina is now an active, vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

 Why?

Two reasons:

 Reason One: For European artists, it is both de rigueur and professionally advantagous to be critical of Zionism. (see Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Annie Lennox and Bosco Maretto).

Reason Two: He is dating the beautiful Dutch soprano, Nanoek Nabil, niece of Rayan Algosaubi, former information liaison of the PLHPC.

Nanoek Nabil in front of Sonji Operagebouw, Spaanshuisken, Netherlands

As an expression of his malcontent (as well as a vivid illustration of his underlying ambivalence, after all, what could possibly be more harmless than art), Currado has embarked on a new series of works addressing the thorny problems of the Middle East.

God is my Realtor ("Dieu est mon agent immobilier") is a series of portraits of Israeli members of the settler movement. Street prophets, messianists, religious fanatics, Russian immigrants, ideologues and soccer Moms looking for three-car garages in a country known for its cramped apartments and high rents are all the subjects of his wide-ranging sketches.

Portrait of Yocheved Har-Or Flieshman, Currado Malaspina, 2012


"I've come to love these people," Currado told me the other day on the phone from Tel Aviv, "unlike the French, their zealotry is an irresistible expression of magic and fatalism. They are probably the world's greatest performance artists."

I asked him if Nanoek felt the same way. "I have no idea," he said, "she spends all her time shopping on Sheinken Street, I barely see her."

Visages des damnés

The Windward Correctional Center, fourteen miles east of Blieblerville, Texas on Highway 159 is a long way from the Pyrénées-Atlantiques where my dear friend Currado Malaspina usually spends the month of August. He is there suffering the cauterizing swelter to pay homage to a man he grew to love.

Malaspina standing in front of one of his portraits of Lanier Christian Smith, 2012

Lanier Christian Smith was a drifter, a drunk and an inveterate liar but one thing he was not was a cold-blooded murderer. And yet on March 21st, 2012, strapped to a pale grey gurney he was treated to an intravenous cocktail of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride and paid the ultimate price.

Currado got to know Smith the same way he became acquainted with half a dozen other convicted murders - drawing his portrait. 

Some people have described Portraits of the Damned as the most odious, rank and repugnant exercise in artistic exploitation since King Ferdinand II of Aragon hired Antonio Dufréy to paint heretics burning at the stake. Others see Malaspina as a modern day Goya, giving visual voice to the silent horrors of state sponsored violence and corruption.

I see it as a pretentious hustle but in this day and age the margin between stunt and the sublime is narrowly ambiguous. 

Between May of 2007 and April 2012 Currado Malaspina went to South Dakota, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania visiting over twenty maximum security prisons in order to draw condemned men and women.  The works were ultimately exhibited in Paris at the Musée de la Peine on Rue St.-Louis en l’Île under the Dantesque title "Visages des damnés."

He is back in Texas for a memorial service for L. C. Smith, as well as for a book signing promoting a small art house publication about the works called The Faces of Fate.

A FINAL FLINT OF FEELING

Currado Malaspina has turned the monkey-jump of misery into an expression of full-throated agony. Leafy fables and grand parables of tragic undoing fill the grave-gray sheets of Currado's newest work. He has encrypted reservoirs of confession, contrition and regret within the stunted script that pack the margins of his recent drawings. Lanes and labyrinths of runty writing course through the thirty-six grief filled pages that comprise the Palimpseste series - completed in secret over the past fifteen years. Recently published by Litografia Fica, a limited edition of prints has recently been made available by Currado's Milanese dealer Athanasius Lafréry.

Tales of thievery, cruelty, adultery, vanity, lechery, jealousy, heresy and false witness are wretchedly woven into painful professions of lassitude, collapse and grief. The bleak elegiac tone of the text is so heartbreaking that even Currado's many detractors have looked upon this new work with sympathy.

Like most of Malaspina's work, the focus is on the female form but in this instance, the figures are no longer anonymous objects of desire but rather specific human beings. Each work is a sackclothed summery of love, lust and betrayal, complete with names and places and dates. It is a roving, ripe, diaristic prattle, completely devoid of all discretion.

But even within this humble darkness, Currado has still managed to vulgarize what could have been seen as an aging ode to innocence. He has been recently working with a team of Italian screenwriters turning his ponderous, heartfelt atonement into a toothless tendril for daytime television.

L'effondrement de la catégorie

My dear friend Currado Malaspina has always dabbled in the occult. Whether it's Justi Bremmer's The Tangy Scent of Angel Wings - the book-length epic poem that inspired the Franco-Celtic cult of Strophic Meditation - Babba Dar-Tag's Ice-Yoga or Ragout Kästner's improbably popular Institute of Volitional Metemphsychosis (Institut für Vorprogrammierte Metemphsychosis), Currado has given just about every metaphysical crackpot equal purchase on his guileless naïveté.

There has been, however, a very disturbing turn of events. For the first time, Currado Malaspina, the grand eminence of the Parisian avant-garde, the hard-nosed sophisticate, the urbane flaneur and citadin raffiné has decided to overtly translate his childish enthusiasms into silly, slight and intellectually bereft paintings.

Binah e Hizzayon, Currado Malaspina 2012 (Courtesy of Galerie Tollhaus, Berlin)

And the public adores them!

Whether it's images of astrological charts, speculative maps of the Lost City of Ubar, meticulous renderings of haunted amulets or reconfigured Ouija Boards, the city of Paris is aflame with Currado's improbable artistic reincarnation. 

One skeptic called it "the shock of the rehash." Another non-believer described it as "a road to Damascus rest stop," expressing the hope that Malaspina will snap out of it as soon as his market dries up.

I, for one, am not so sanguine. I recently met up with Currado in Berlin and he was clearly not himself. Aside from the fact that he was wearing a  red-string bracelet and a magic lotus necklace he was also in the company of the beautiful South Asian supermodel Veena Shabobob.

Veena Shabobob in Cannes, 2012

 Shabobob, whose eyes are milky and mysterious  wields an almost mystical control over her many romantic interests. She's as delicate as paper and the men in her life feel obliged to sustain her by silence and obedience. She is considered by her admirers as an Apauruseya  - "not of human agency" - and as an adept rustic Tantrik she combines sexual ingenuity with a robust agricultural fortitude.

In short, if she told Currado to shoplift from the Vatican Library he would do it. Shabobob consults the stars the way others check their email and her complete submission to the supernatural makes Nancy Reagan look like a physicist. Sad to say, she's got Currado hooked.

So keep looking for trifling, superstitious baubles from that once formidable French artist ... at least as long as his moon continues to rise over Veena.

     

Boys Will Be Boys

Some see the artistic vocation as the inevitable offspring of rock-ribbed affinities and singular, idiosyncratic conviction. Artists, it is generally assumed, are drawn toward their passions like flies to a rotting cadaver. Born to their métier, they appear to have no choice. Artists themselves refer to it as "a calling", implying destiny and an occult sense of virtue. 

My dear friend Currado Malaspina does not share this conventional reading - in fact he is repulsed by it - and sees the artistic enterprise rather as the consequence of chance and as a shallow reflection of our baser instincts .

Currado Malaspina, Auvers-sur-Oise, 2012

Since childhood Currado Malaspina dreamed of becoming a pilot. When he entered the French military in the late 60's he was determined to serve in the Armée de l'Air. After attending the academy at Salon-de-Provence he was transferred to Châteaubernard where he flew the Mirage F1-CR on training missions in the Sahel. When his plane malfunctioned in 1968, forcing him to crash land on the Ghadem salt flats he sustained severe head and spine injuries and almost didn't survive.

He was found unconscious by a family of Tuareg nomads who nursed him back to health by stabilizing his fractures with tightly bound fox skins and sustaining him on a diet of black tea and lentils. It was during his convalescence that Currado began to draw.

One of his first efforts was a quick sepia rendering of the 11th century Dormition of the Mother of God Monastery in Taghirt.

Currado Malaspina, conté crayon on cardboard, 1969

The locals were extremely impressed by these early efforts and Currado quickly gained an unusual status within the hermetic hierarchy of the indigenous tribes. When they offered him a young beautiful bride, three camels and a milk goat he realized that it was time to return to France. 

His hopes for a career as a pilot were summarily dashed but the connection between art and Eros became for Currado a talisman signifying both hope and magic. Terror, coincidence, migration and sex   continue to be guiding principles and aesthetic touchstones for Malaspina's very strange and singular work.