A gaggle of bug-eyed admirers waited by the back door of Jovan Bohuslav’s brand new 400 square meter Belleville gallery. The opening had a spillover mob clogging Rue Louise Weiss  irritating the locals and causing  concern among the sapeurs-pompiers de Paris who were standing nearby.

My friend, Currado Malaspina was having his first exhibition in five years and the highly anticipated event inflected the French hipster crowd with a uniquely American style FOMO* anxiety.

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Carnaval des Désenchanté no.6, Currado Malaspina 2004

The work, if you could call it that, was an immense series of immense watercolors depicting every single site and street of the 12th arrondissement. The entire project – which was carried on in complete secrecy – took Currado over fifteen years to complete. Oberkampf, Ménilmontant, Bastille, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Daumesnil, Bercy, Malaspina covered it all with a kind of methodical happenstance. Wherever he happened to take his daily café et croissant aux amandes was where he began his search for his urban motif.

Quite frankly, apart from the sheer depravity of the project, its compulsiveness and its irrational revisionist posture, the work is rather boring. Perhaps its saving grace are the 12 or so pictures depicting the famous Carnaval des Désenchanté  in the Bois de Vincennes. These have a eerie Fellini-like strangeness that continues to haunt me even now.

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Carnaval des Désenchanté no.1, Currado Malaspina 2004

The critical reception to the works was hostile when it wasn’t indifferent but that has not deterred the public from visiting the show in droves. The paintings quickly sold out and there is talk of Malaspina beginning a new series in the Quatrieme.

If that is the case, I think Currado better work on his renderings of water.

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* social media argot for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’