CYNIC OR SAGE? DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

There are some for whom flamboyance is a skimpy veil of obfuscation. They behave in ways so conspicuous that their legitimate selves become lost in a tangle of histrionics. Others operate within a humble sussuro of confidence and competence discreetly going about their daily tasks with graceful sprezzatura.

And then there is Currado Malaspina.

With his fustian baritone and his all-weather green felt hat Currado manages to make everyone around him feel simultaneously welcome and degraded. It’s an odd talent and I don’t think it’s anything conscious but when he enters a room the air suddenly thickens with the dread of anticipation.

He’s like two people operating within an elastic dramaturgical derma. You never know which Currado you will get.

This is annoying.

But it’s is also breathtaking, for how many people are there who can captivate and repel you with every single interaction?

Malaspina is just that sort of personage, even when he’s most irritating.

Especially when he’s most irritating!!

But, as he likes to say, fais gaffe!

When you get even the least bit attached to this mercurial Frenchman you find yourself caught within a mesh of his manipulative influence.

Only a Svengali of such exquisite effectiveness, one who can mesmerize even the most jaded and cold, would be capable of producing a body of work so popular and ubiquitous yet so totally bereft of any real meaning.

 As Currado always says “thank god for ignorance!!”

TOLLE, LEGE

My friend, the enigmatic French painter Currado Malaspina had something of a religious conversion in the most unlikely of places. Currado, the consummate cosmopolite who is equally at home in Rome as he is in Istanbul had his unlikely Milvian Bridge moment in the cramped, damp guest house behind my two-bedroom Spanish in Silverlake.

He was here last summer, somewhat in hiding, though it was an open secret among his friends back in Paris. Reeling from a series of bad reviews, bad romances and bad weather, Currado came to L.A. to take the cure.

He spent most of his times indoors – he finds neither the sun nor the ocean particularly salubrious – listening to Schubert and painting small watercolors of endangered fish. He would surface in the evening only to retreat a few hours later after polishing off a bottle of wine with a few crusts of coarse black bread and a thimbleful of imported cheese.

His self-imposed exile, like all attempts at purgation, was an unnecessary exhortation of homeopathic magic. Only through wounds, the theory goes, could one summon the messengers of atonement. (It’s no small irony that my next door Rastafari neighbors, finding no truck in torment, manage the same result using homegrown Big Bud marijuana).

Like a bereaved boulevardier he would roam the early morning avenues of L.A. muttering to himself in Corsican. No matter which direction he took he could never find that elusive boulangerie with the flakey warm croissants that would almost certainly make things right again. Instead he passed tire shops and hair salons and the deficit of pedestrian traffic only added to his already crippling sense of alienation.

And then it happened and everything changed.

On one particularly desperate morning the pursuit of breakfast pastries found Currado lost and disoriented in one of those nondescript ethnic enclaves that freckle our sprawling grid of relentless urban iteration. Stopping to ask directions from a young bearded man whose cheap suit and fedora reminded him of the London ska bands of the 1970’s, he was drawn into conversation by the promise of hot coffee and the hitherto unfamiliar bagel. I’m not exactly sure what nerve was hit and how but before you could say Chi Rho Currado was wrapped in leather straps praying not to collapse into a hypoglycemic coma.

Malaspina now goes by the name Carmi ben Abraham and like Cat Stevens before him, it wasn’t the wisest career move. He seems to be happy and his work is still progressing though it has taken an iconographic shift I still don’t quite understand. I’ll never know what transpired that morning in L.A. but since then whenever I see a big van parked on the curb I make sure to quickly cross the street to the other side.

COEXISTENCE

Several years ago, while suffering what could only be described as a crisis of creativity, the Paris-based painter Currado Malaspina sublet his Rue de la Harpe studio and moved to Istanbul.

The move proved auspicious in more ways than one.

Unless one has been hibernating under a boulder these past few years, Malaspina’s Palimpseste has crossed your radar. Though the most serious drawings from the series are well behind him, (he has recently signed a six-figure design deal with the clothing company Noitanbreh, licensing it to use Palimpseste motifs in its recent line of golf shirts), scholars are still debating the sources and allusions of this complicated and at times fascinating work.

Few realize that Palimpseste began on that extended trip to Turkey.

One of the perks of being a European art star is acquiring private access to major monuments and museums well after they close to the general public. Such was the case for Currado in Istanbul where with the help of the recently indicted former Minister of Cultural Affairs, Ohannes Evranaki he was able to study the frescoes and mosaics of the Hagia Sophia without the distraction of gawking tourists and their ubiquitous cell phones.

He was able to make detailed drawings, take countless photographs and was even able to climb a specially constructed scaffold in order to measure the works in relation to the space with absolute precision. When Currado becomes curious about something, he becomes a thoroughly obsessive, if not entirely systematic, researcher.

The remnants of two cultures are embedded on the walls like estranged lovers shackled to a cruel conjugal bed. They press against each other with an oddly aggressive tension teasing one another with the fantasy of an unlikely reconciliation.

Jesus and Mohammed tagged to the walls of this vast cathedral of piety and intolerance, consigned to coexistence by the sole virtue of time. Together they create a peculiar visual counterpoint that immediately struck Malaspina as both magical and brutal. He spent hours studying the work, returning day after day with his tape measure and drafting pencils until the Turkish authorities began suspecting that he was either a raging lunatic or an operative of the Mossad.

When he finally returned to France (I believe his visa was revoked), he had sketchbooks full of images and notes.

As an added momento, he also returned with a severe crick in the neck.

Pro Phylacteries

Though I vehemently advised him against it, in early 2002, Currado Malaspina, the French painter known for his depictions of voluptuary, unhindered and at times deviant sexuality began experimenting with geometric abstraction.

Mon Ami Foucault, oil on linen, 314 x 1270 centimeters, Currado Malaspina 2002

And as if that wasn’t enough, all the paintings he completed at that time were done en grisaille!

It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly decided a to publish a cookbook.

Why this unexpected turn of events? There were many theories floating around at the time ranging from rumors of a withering libido to an irrational infatuation with the United States. Whatever the motives, the public wasn’t buying. He was pilloried by the press, ignored by the critics and spurned by his faithful coterie of collectors.

Finding himself in a professional diaspora, Malaspina turned inward and began a long-standing flirtation with the Baha’i faith, an interest which continues to this day.

He has since abandoned non-objective painting and has returned to the semi-smutty style that has earned him his notorious reputation.

But he has never forgotten his love of Haifa, the center of the Baha’i faith. And while many of his rock star friends insist on boycotting the Jewish State he still occasionally returns to Israel for short visits. He especially enjoys early morning visits to the Wailing Wall.

I think  he gets a little turned on by all the leather.

PIETRO_ARETINO.NET

For many years the career of Currado Malaspina was a brackish, destitute furl of quiet latency. Here was a man with a solid body of interesting work, with yearly exhibitions and favorable press yet unable to reach a level of true preeminence. He was well-known in Paris during the 70’s and 80’s but in the art world at the time that was a parochial achievement at best. Outside the francophone world the name Malaspina meant next to nothing

Then he met me.

Exhibition announcement designed to be seen exclusively on Twitter feeds. (courtesy of XNet DzN, 2013)

What most artists caught between the Reagan era and the Internet age fail to grasp is that ‘social capital’ is far more important than talent. Though Warhol could not have been more explicit in his prophecies, the artists who came of age in the shadow of the New York School modeled themselves on the poètes maudits when they should have been looking at the pitchmen of Madison Avenue. Long before words like ‘branding’ and ‘viral’ became bedrocks of our vernacular, the great artist/showmen recognized that paraphrase is far stronger and certainly more memorable than poetry.

One could plausibly argue that this pact with the devil compromises the quality of one’s work but if no one sees your work, what good is quality? What the spirit of the age has instructed us is that it is far better to be accessible than to be interesting. A recent article about the distinguished periodical The New York Review of Books – currently celebrating its 50th anniversary  – boasts that it has a readership of approximately 140,000! Forgive me for being blunt but BuzzFeed’s list of the “23 most important selfies of 2013” received a quarter of a million hits within the first two hours of its posting!

The fact that within a few years of meeting me Currado Malaspina started tracking somewhere between the poet Vachel Lindsay and the indie band The Afghan Whigs speaks for itself. Now that he is fully set up with Buzznet, Flickr, Skyrock and Twitter he has sprinted way past both Don Knotts and Artisanal Dim Sum.

Maquette pour le Marquis #3, Currado Malaspina 2010

Of course, I guess to some extent the works helps a little.

But really, does anyone ever talk about Agostino Carracci anymore?

Agostino Carracci

THE UNGIFTED CHILD

Childhood is everything. The map of our characters is indelibly drawn by the time we reach puberty. We carry the baggage of our upbringing like a battered trunk and just when we think we’ve successfully discarded its contents at some distantly remote bus station or railway yard, there comes FedEx returning the torn familiar vault of our nagging inconvenient past only to be sorted again, repacked and safely stored away.

Malaspina in Cannes, 2009 (Courtesy of Presse IPM)

The French artist Currado Malaspina and I were lovers between the spring of 1998 when I was a 22 year-old graduate student till the winter of 2001. In that time I witnessed both his brilliant courage and his brittle insecurity. I’ve thought a great deal about those distant years and they have served as a cautionary tale regarding my own development as an artist. You see, Currado and I, though over twenty years apart in age, are very similar and those eerie similarities are what pulled us apart.

Currado’s father, Sordello Malaspina was a Roma musician of moderate ability and exaggerated pretension. Like my own father his imprint was the result of his absence rather than his influence. The course of Malaspina’s career has been one long search for his missing father’s approval. I know scores and scores of artists but I never met anyone who curated their reputation as carefully as Currado. It was never important whether his work was any good what mattered most was how it was perceived.

Untitled monotype, Currado Malaspina 1998

The esteem of critics, the admiration from peers, the cultivation of curators and the ultimate validation of the marketplace are the abiding values that guide his practice. One could easily argue that his fawning obsequiousness was the perfect recipe for his success. His spineless scraping and his cowering flatteries have brought about strategic alliances that are the envy of his more talented contemporaries. There is no boot too insignificant to lick, no backside too inconsequential to kiss. His relentless search for a faded father’s love has contorted his character into nothing but an appetite where naked desire denies him him of the possibility of any real depth.

Dahlia Danton, 2013

I hope I can elude Currado’s sad, despicable pathologies. The burdens of our past are the stones in our pockets drawing us down into the well of unrelenting despair. The only possible antidote is the authentic genius of real competence and for that one needs discipline. Malaspina is a lost cause. For me there still may be some hope.

NON VENI PACEM MITTERE, SED GLADIUM

Vice, as is often pointed out, is infinitely more compelling than virtue. The central role of sin in the iconography of medieval art and literature is ample evidence to illustrate the point. These ubiquitous twin poles of psychology remain robust to this day but with much less disorder.

Currado Malaspina put it this way in a recently published interview with the mystery writer Dimitri Hectopolis:

“There’s a comforting harmony in our predictable and conventional tastes. On the whole, lower-income Americans are drawn to gluttony while their upper-class well-educated fellow citizens prefer greed. We French still favor lust and the whole world is united in its infatuation with violence.”

Currado’s latest endeavor is a lovely meditation on what he describes as “perversity, corruption and rot”  (la perversité, la corruption et la pourriture). Based on the Laudario di Mangiare il Fegato a 14th century luxury manuscript commissioned by the lay confraternity of Sienese potters and dyers, Malaspina’s modern rendering of this book of song is filled with chilling depictions of martyred Christian saints.

The Stroking of Saint Pasquina, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Fifth century martyr, Saint Pasquina of the Mystic Eyre who was beaten with sharpened stones, flogged with a spiked horse hair whip and then boiled in a cauldron of burning oil was a favorite subject of the Tuscan artisans who commissioned the book of hymns that serves as Malaspina’s point of departure. Currado has created an entirely updated version of these violent events, adding irony and whimsy to the traditional gasconade of self-satisfied terror.

I personally find these subtle and lyrical new works to have a deeply innocent, almost confectionary sense of compassion and piety. Their obvious autobiographical allusions permeate the pieces with the tenderness of honest confession. That others find the work misguided and grotesque speaks more about repression and a general discomfort with the legitimacy of natural urges and fantasies.

I salute Currado and the fathers of the Catholic Church for being the consummate curators of the human condition!

Io sò io, e vvoi nun zete un cazzo

The art world is a weary chaparral of bitter rivalries and inconsequential dog-feuds fought into a draw. Currado Malaspina is an undecorated, ignominious  veteran of these hostilities but as he approaches his sixtieth year he is showing early signs of  fatal exhaustion.

Could the cigar-smoking, womanizing, brandy sipping bon-vivant be losing his edge?

I am speaking here about an uncharacteristic act of apparent unsolicited generosity. It seems that last April, at a dinner party at the home of the art historian Dr. Orestia Shestov, the subject of what is euphemistically called “emerging artists” came up. In attendance that evening was a miscellaneous assembly of curators, critics and collectors with a few artists thrown in for comic relief. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I was present as well though partially distracted by an evangelical desire to get completely hammered).

Currado began by rattling off the names of about half a dozen inconsequential sycophants who could be counted on later to provide him any number of reciprocal services. While a heavy brume of disinterested boredom descended upon the table like morphine, Currado began an impassioned pitch for the hitherto unsung Emilian painter Cathar Crucesignati.

Cathar Crucesignati

Crucesignati, a twenty-seven year old self proclaimed artistic secchiona (roughly the Italian equivalent for nerd or geek), studied with Cervello Stravaganti at L’Istituto di Belle Arti Modena and became something of an invisible protégé for the famous minimalist painter. She caught Currado’s attention when he saw her work at a group show at The Bureau de Liaison Culturel Français Italien (full disclosure no. 2 – I was with him then too and was singularly unimpressed).

He has since never missed an opportunity to sing her praises and promote her career (full and painful disclosure no.3 – he never did that for me).

And now, all the nagging and pestering of his influential contacts have yielded for Crucesignati her first one woman show in Paris.  Bain de Boue, an exhibition of some 35 paintings and drawings revolving around the theme of mud bathing will open next week at Galerie Arrêtdeporte on rue de la Huchette.

Bagno con Cappello, Cathar Crucesignati, acrylic on canvas, 2013

As for my final full disclosure, I think that my once discerning friend Currado Malaspina is showing the first signs of intellectual cognitive decay.

HABIT

Like many people, Currado Malaspina’s sense of optimism and personal well-being is intimately tied to the daily evacuation of his bowels. Nothing restores his faith in himself and his place in the world like a quick and unencumbered movement. He typically visits the lavatory a few short minutes after completing his second cup of early morning swiss-pressed coffee. He joins neither book nor newspaper to this enterprise preferring the prompt efficiency of concentrated effort and determined resolve.

I know all this because I was living with him in Paris in the late 1990’s and I witnessed all his circadian habits with the bemused scrutiny of an amateur anthropologist. Currado would express to me all his strongly held views on his personal hygiene thinking that this kind of intense  intimacy could somehow replace the more risky, emotional kind. His scatological obsessions were strictly physiological and he suffered little levity in the matter. He was easily offended by jokes and despite the easy accessibility of hilarious material Currado remained stoic in the face of puns, hostile to sarcasm and impervious to irony.

I once sent him a small water closet watercolor and inscribed the back with the famous aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Objections, evasions, cheerful mistrust, and love of mockery are indications of health: everything absolute belongs with pathology.”

He promptly sent it back to me with his own favorite Nietzschean citation: “Honesty is the great temptress of all fanatics,”  adding menacingly in bold red ink “Sois prudente ma coquinette!”

Lesson learned.

When it comes to great men of uncanny genius never underestimate the vital necessity of ritual.

THE ISLAND OF THE LOTUS-EATERS

When Currado Malaspina was a little boy growing up in the Marais his best friend, Yves Bernard-Djouza – who later in life became the television actor Bernie Beignet – spent his summers visiting his grandparents on the island of Djerba. As was the custom at the time, young Yves would return to Paris in September with a small gift for his “meilleur ami.’

Typically these took the form of paper kites and spinning tops, small sand clocks, ships in a bottle, brightly colored marbles or balsa wood airplanes. One year however, Yves came back with the strangest gift of all:  An old book apparently pilfered from the library of his nono Sammy Djouza, who acted as the unofficial beadle of the Hara Sghira synagogue.

Young Currado would pore over the indecipherable pages and their exotic typefaces whose arrangements reminded him of mazes. He loved the feel of the worn, brittle paper, stained with use and discolored by the sun. For years Currado kept the book on his nightstand, a sort of talisman protecting him from what he always called his ‘sleep-devils’ (diables de sommeil). During the years when we were together I found the book rather creepy but never dared to challenge the strange power it had over the equally strange Malaspina.

When he first started working on his Palimpseste series, I didn’t immediately make the connection.

But now, many years later, I can see how a person inclined to interpret the world visually sees even books and words from the point of view of form. Those who have ascribed every manner of metaphor and allusion to Malaspina’s Palimpseste series have completely missed the mark. For Currado, beauty is everything and the realm of the senses is more than enough to captivate his lush, limitless imagination.