AGAINST THE GALLOP

Like many great artists, Currado Malaspina’s best work comes from a place of profound agony. Beneath the fat-headed grandiloquence is a vulnerable romantic cautiously frisking a cruel world in search of hope. While his public persona might be that of a callous, flashy libertine, his true nature is tender, loving and kind.

I should know because I spent four unforgettable years living and loving this legendary French artist.

One of the rich, corrective dividends of being an ex is that when one carefully tills the furrows of past discord, a true, intimate friendship can develop and grow.

Such is the case with Currado and me. It is my privilege to be taken into Malaspina’s confidence and though I find myself giving much more than I get there is something quite special in having an intimate perspective into the creative genius of one of today’s greatest artists.

As is well documented, Currado Malaspina has (so far) been married four times. Each marriage is accompanied by scandal, prurient speculation, salacious innuendo and idle fodder suggesting all manner of copulatory madness outside the sacred sanctuary of wedlock. The truth, as is often the case, is much simpler.

When Currado decides to love he loves hard and any thought of straying from the orchard is happily obliterated. Take it from me – When it comes to fidelity, Malaspina is a Saint Bernard. Women sense this about him and women being women he therefore gets treated like a dust cloth.

Wife number one gave birth to a beautiful daughter – Sabine Héloïse – and within six months ran off with her yoga teacher to Goa to study Ashtanga breathing techniques from an Israeli guru named Alon.

Wife two, a very talented pastry chef and not-too-talented actress tried to lure him away from his studio with any number of hair-brained, get-rich schemes. Currado has about as much business acumen as a toddler selling lemonade and the two of them got so buried in debt that he was forced to exhibit some of his most unmemorable works. Fortunately the name Malaspina carries enough caché that armies of credulous collectors came barking with euros.

#2 eventually sued for divorce and was awarded more than half of his existing oeuvre.

With wife three came with the promise of blissful tranquility and mutual adoration until she got sucked into a Belgian messianic sewing circle.. The way Currado tells it, she turned forty and decided overnight that the most important thing in life was “personal rapture.”

It was there where she learned how to use the cumbersome neologism ‘defoliating opportunity,‘  (opporunité défoliante).

Forgetting for a minute the sinister connection to clearing  jungle war zones with toxic herbicides, the idea is essentially to annihilate any self-critical, introspective insights in favor of unambiguous affirmation. It’s a clever form of denial which tends to treat psychic pain with a Bugs Bunny Band Aid. To the philosopher in Currado this sort of linguistic floor-bending was maddening.

He left the infantilized #3 the day she took him to her Renewal Assignment Ceremony where each guest was presented with a brightly colored ball of yarn and was encouraged to “exchange anguish points” with the person seated next to them.

 Wife number four, who some say resembles a younger version of me, is an attorney who works in the French ministère du budget, des comptes publics et de l’administration civile. By all accounts she’s a very competent bureaucrat who performs her duties with diligence and integrity. I think that by marrying Currado she hoped to establish her credibility as a formidable woman of culture, a quality of some value among the Parisian haute bourgeoisie. As one might expect, she’s a rather cold fish and treats Malaspina like a household appliance.

I know he’s dying inside – he as much as told me so when I visited him last summer.

Currado is a good man. He’s a man in very close contact with the world of the senses. He values love above all else and celebrates its possibility with childish optimism.

Critics are quick to over-interpret his art, seeing in his lurid images hints of bitterness, vulgarity, misogyny and lust. That was never really the case. Malaspina’s work has always been about humor, poetry and joy. What some see as badly drawn soft pornography he sees as a post-modern exegesis on Ovid’s evolving relationship to the history of painting.

 Perhaps he’s doomed. Perhaps he’s one more reckless romantic, crushed on the asphalt of our age of monotonous velocity. He’s a voluptuary on a vélo while an unreflecting, routinized world is obsessed with the predictable seductions of speed.

I’m waiting till his current bride overplays her precious hand. She doesn’t deserve such a rare beacon of decency. I’m waiting, Currado and I’m ready to give us another chance.

Je t’aime, mon amour …

BRANDING IN AN AGE OF SENSUAL DEFICIT

Seen through a jaundiced 21st Century lens I suppose we’d characterize the Van Gogh brand as Crazy. During a simpler, quainter time when I was studying painting in art school fancy words like ‘discourse,’ ‘dialectic’ and ‘disjunctive’ were bandied about as if their definitions were self-evident. Now the talk is all about marketing.

Maybe the professors are still filling disinterested ears with Laconian linguistics but the students, I can assure you, are just fidgeting with their i-phones.

That said, us oldsters have to keep up with the times and if that means maintaining an Instagram account then so be it.

My dear friend and erstwhile lover Currado Malaspina has always, as the French say, “seen beyond the baguette.” In a very unassuming and innocent fashion he’s been cultivating his own brand for years. Now he’s ready to exploit it to its fullest effect.

So to Caravaggio’s Thug, Modigliani’s Tubercular, Pollock’s Alcoholic and Warhol’s Androgynic we can now add Currado Malaspina’s Priapic Olympiad!

My sister Hope knows all about this stuff. You might say she’s a full-time branding self improver. Her library at home is stacked with books on how to distinguish oneself and get ahead. Leaders Eat Last shares a long, sagging shelf with Principles of Corporate Governance, Executive Power Moves, Time Management for Dummies and Perfect Mindset for Team Motivators.

Why waste valuable time with Proust when you can learn all about the habits of highly effective people between the glossy soft covers of a remaindered trade paperback?

I’m not exactly sure what Hope does for a living but I can tell she really loves it. She gets so animated whenever she recounts some tawdry tale of inter-office intrigue that I truly believe it has a weird erotic effect upon her. She works for a mid-sized corporation whose interpersonal ecosystem has the same sort of social suffocation of a small provincial college. As a result there is never any shortage of fodder for petty, political machination and drama.

Our immigrant parents were world-class lunatics who considered praise an unseemly form of extravagance. I think that’s why Hope is so drawn to the corporate structure of reward and affirmation. Being a manager is very gratifying to her and I know it means a lot when she receives encouraging compliments form her boss and from her peers.

It’s funny because we had the same exact childhood but I guess some people are perpetually triggered by the misadventures of their imperfect past.

Anyway, Currado has met my sister several times and though he finds her insufferably boring he’s at the same time quite taken by her desperate need to fit in and belong. He claims that this fetish to conform is a uniquely American phenomenon but any close reading of European history would strongly argue otherwise.

But Currado being Currado, Hope’s hopeful hopelessness has given him what he thinks will be a million dollar idea. Using my sister as a microcosm of an entire continent’s Calvinist restraint, he’s certain that an urgent craving for pleasure and lassitude lies nascent beneath the surface. Recognizing that there’s a puritanical allergy toward spontaneity he’s devised a codified template to address what he sees as a national spiritual malaise

And so began Currado’s now famous 10 Habits of Extremely Contented and Well-Cultivated People. Focusing on the California model of naive optimism and maximalist aspiration, his gimmick is the promise of happiness through rote. Follow his breezy, uncomplicated steps and you too can enjoy life like a Parisian!

It’s as absurd as it is successful but rather than take my word for it, judge for yourself. What follows, in short form, are his 10 sequential conditions for bliss, legitimized by the imprimatur of notable and respected celebrities:

1. Eat well and in heathy moderation. (Gerard Depardieu)
2. Spend time with friends and cultivate the art of argument and conversation. (Orestia Shestov)
3. Dolce Far Niente. (Albert Camus)
4. Enjoy sex. (Serge Gainsbourg)
5. Drink 0.40 liters of wine a day. (James Mayer Rothschild)
6. Read fiction and attend the theatre regularly. (Micah Carpentier)
7. Pursue sex. (Philippe Soupault)
8. Be honest – there’s less to remember. (Mark Twain)
9. Laugh as much as possible. (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing)
10. Develop a talent for sexual intimacy. (Henry Miller)

Yes, I know it’s stupid and I know it’s a gimmick but I honestly think that Currado is on to something. Americans are addicted to lists. They also easily defer to what they think are experts. In their obedience they will undoubtedly follow his manifesto and just like all good citizens, when they fail they will only blame themselves.

What could be a better brand than blind obeisance?!

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Rectitude is the sincerest form of treachery.

Currado Malaspina, my erstwhile companion and backsliding swain was fond of enigmatic aphorisms. They would come to him in flashes and once uttered, consigned to the winds of amnesia.

J’ai dit ça? (I said that?) was his constant refrain as if I accused him of some unspeakable intellectual transgression.

Je ne souviens plus  (I don’t remember).

As if he were testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

I regret not taking notes.

He was in love with me and I believe he was constantly posing as some sort of portentous visionary.

To devalue life is to celebrate oblivion.

He said that after they found a pair of nasty follicular cysts in the back his mouth and he thought he might temporarily lose his beloved powers of speech.

To those who know Currado merely by his reputation, the perception is that he is a blowhard and a fool. Though there is a great deal of truth to that there’s another side of him that’s tender and a bit vulnerable.

And if his best work is indeed behind him as some of his critics have maliciously claimed, at least he’s leaving behind something of enduring aesthetic value.

Palipseste 5, Currado Malaspina

I tried my best to love him back but his vinegary breath held a soft dull echo of cheap wine and sage and I couldn’t very well support that.

Maybe it was the cyst.

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.

CONNECTIONS

A ringing truth more resonate than revelation, more terrifying than prophesy and more damaging to one’s ego than the caustic reverberations of a bad review. I’m referring to the many oracular pronouncements that come from the mouth of a beloved mentor. For years I was enthralled by the slanted wisdom of Currado Malaspina.He coaxed me into questioning my rigid and and constraining orthodoxies and shamed me into a lassitude of careful, obedient compliance.  What I thought I knew I questioned and what I questioned was reduced into marginality. Currado’s charisma and sheer persuasive bellicosity had me cowering like a kitten.

Currado Malaspina, Istanbul, 2006

I didn’t know who I was anymore. I lived like a dull reflection of myself buried beneath the shadow of an acclaimed master. My friends envied my privileged position as the amanuensis and lady in waiting to one of France’s most famous contemporary artists.I was Currado Malaspina’s assistant, his lover and his confidante and I was miserable living the dream in the City of Light.

Danton and Malaspina, Paris, summer 1999

Be careful what you wish for. Enthralled to a living legend locks the normally creative mind into an aurelian shackle of diffidence and servility. I put Currado above all else, above my needs, above my ambitions and worst of all, above my work. I was a cog in the enterprise of furthering the career of an already inflated vedette de la monde artistique. I worked night and day on curating his image, burnishing his reputation and creating a climate of constant anticipation.

Untitled monotype, Currado Malsapina, 1998

At the time his work was a boilerplate of cheap scandal and facile provocation. That it was also demeaning of women was a fact that conveniently eluded my besotted inattention. In retrospect it’s hard to believe how blind I was in my compliance and capitulations.

Such is the predicament of the young, grasping artist. In a field crowded with identical aspirants the conditions for success are a vague blueprint of strategic compromises, ethical lapses and a muddled pub crawl through the anuses of the famous and the well-connected.

In today’s lexicon it’s called networking.

Back then it was called prostitution.

POLITESSE IS FOR LES OISEAUX

There is something so exhilarating about indignation. Feigned, righteous or otherwise, being pissed is good for the circulation. Having grown up in the midwest it took me a while to figure this out. Meeting the French painter Currado Malaspina teased the corn husks out of my hair and turned me toward the true path of artistic ire, resentment, petty rivalry and professional wrath.

“There’s nothing like a good, mean-spirited intellectual brawl full of ad hominem attacks, libelous invective, empty threats and punishing assertions bordering upon the precipice of conventional civility.”

That’s how he put it to me years ago after he took me to a party at the studio of one of his oldest friends, the sculptor René Lacarte.

He and Lacarte were old school chums with as many shared memories as shared mistresses. Their friendship was as durable as one of Lacarte’s monumental cor-ten steel sculptures and it allowed them to communicate with a callous and sometimes brutal candor.

Currado had just completed an exhibition of large-scale works on paper, the subject of which, many critics observed, bordered on the gratuitously sleazy.

Currado vigorously defended his work claiming that considering the contemporary absence of any normative taboos they were as innocuous as a pastoral vista of Ruisdael and as void of provocation as a Madonna by Zurbarán. Lacarte countered that Ruisdael was far from innocuous and Zurbarán is as highly charged today as he was in the 17th century. He called Currado ‘un mauvais menteur‘ a French insult that is far more wounding than calling someone in English a bad liar.

The party ended with blows, broken bottles and dramatic declarations of permanent war.

I was shocked.

The next morning René joined us for croissants at Café Procope as if nothing had happened.

And in fact, nothing had.

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.

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.