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 …

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!!”

A SHORT LESSON IN HISTORY

The art of bad photography is a lot harder than it seems. Within the holy trinity of Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter there lies an elusive aesthetic of militant conformity that is easy to see but much more difficult to master.

Beside the boilerplate of nature and food our glutted bank of collective imagery contains shoes, hair, architecture, street signs, headlines, animals, manicures and billions and billions and billions of small children. To someone trained in the visual arts the monotony can be a bit staggering.

To my former boyfriend, the French Marxist painter Currado Malaspina the democratization of photography is a very positive social phenomenon that is well worth watching. To dismiss it all as an empty expression of desperate narcissism is to risk losing a valuable opportunity in studying a societal/aesthetic shift that is practically unprecedented.  Not since the 18th century when Faber-Castell began mass producing pencils have we seen such a massive wave of graphic amateurism.

On a recent trip to to the Bavarian town of Schwanstetten where the first wooden graphite stump appeared in 1646, Currado discovered in the archives of the municipal library thousands upon thousands of crude drawings of precisely the types of things regularly posted on Facebook and Pinterest.

Bratwurst and sauce, pencil on paper, anonymous, 17th century

It seems that various forms of social media image sharing has been around a lot longer than we care to admit. Currado goes even further in asserting that the cave paintings of Lasceaux are nothing more than daily “posts” representing the unsubstantiated claims of third-rate hunters.

To Malaspina the imagery is a form of Paleolithic branding, the sort of reputational inflation one sees on business résumés and Linkedin profiles. Instead of wild claims of fluency in Latin and concert-level musicianship, the artists of Lasceaux were asserting their unlikely expertise in animal husbandry.

To those who ridicule the digital age for its superficiality Currado wags an admonishing emoticon. To make hash of the hashtag is like snubbing one’s nose at 750,000 years of glorious human mediocrity.

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.

THE EMPTY HAND OF THE HEART

“The righteous suffer stoically while the vain refrain from all inhibition”

So wrote Alphonse Zhekunin (translation mine), the 19th century poète maudit famous for his light verse on dark subjects. I can’t think of a better summery of the emotional maturity of the well-known French painter Currado Malaspina.

To Currado grief is less a hardship than an opportunity. To be struck by misfortune is to be handed a license for mawkish self-indulgence. When the Parisian paparazzi caught him cavorting with Princess Tzipora Al-Tzina of El Dahfra he responded with a series of histrionic screeds of such venomous proportion even the vindictive Al-Tzina family were shocked in silence.

Princess Tzipora Al-Tzina with Malaspina

His dalliances are always accompanied by drama. A meddling concierge all too eager to stir up a scandalous ragoût positioned a camera across from Currado’s atleier and snapped hundreds of pictures until she landed upon something vaguely edible.

The press would have remained indifferent (this is France, after all) but Malaspina cried foul so loudly they were forced to publish the unincriminating photographs.

I think that at heart Currado is a romantic but within the thick miasma of his disfunction he can only express his longings as melodrama.

After all, isn’t this the same Currado who not so long ago painted this lovely double portrait of the two of us?

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.

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

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!