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!!”

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.

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.

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!

IN SEARCH OF WASTED TIME

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.

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.

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.

* social media argot for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’

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.

La haine du domicile

French writer, filmmaker and visual artist Currado Malaspina can’t seem to sit still. Obdurate abnegater of both the pleasures and securities of bourgeois domesticity, Currado is dangerously inclined toward the vertiginous experiences of a nomadic flâneur. On a recent trip to Dar-el-Salam on the east bank of the Upper Nile he was so savagely mugged by a pair of angry teenagers that he lost two central incisors and the highest three registers of his vocal chords.

“It’s the price you pay for adventure,” he calmly explained to me last week in Cannes where we were both guests of the Danish director Arvada Taremby. “I still love Egypt and I’d go back tomorrow.”

Currado Malaspina on the Mediterranean coast in Ras El Bar, Egypt

He went on to explain in his newly minted rasp (which I confess, I find rather sexy) how he can feel the rapture of perfect solitude only while lost within the commotion of a teeming multitude. He calls it the fierce, feral energy of untamed universal communion ( l’énergie féroce et sauvage d’ivresse d’universelle communion).

His passion and conviction were hypnotic. The poetic manner in which he expressed himself was both mesmerizing and vaguely familiar.

It was only later that I learned that Currado and Taremby have been working together on a screenplay based on the life and work of Baudelaire.

Encore dupé!

KING JAMES PIROUETTES IN HIS CRYPT

 Boredom and despair sometimes result is acts of eccentric piety and ponderous humility.

 

When “The Creeping Moss of Tainted Gladness” (La Mousse Rampante de Joie Perdu, Carillon 2007) was published in the United States in late 2009 my good friend, Currado Malaspina set out on a 47 city promotional tour which yielded little more than a mild case of gout and about 30,000 frequent flyer miles.

In the space of fifteen days, Currado did readings in Tuscon, Orlando, San Diego, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Portland, Reno and about a dozen other hotbeds of the international art trade. Firing his agent did little to assuage his deep, sepulchral depression.

 

To pass the time between his committments Currado drank overpriced mojitos in countless hotel lounges, glared blankly at the saturated images on his flat screen TV and reread the bible, though this time, Gideon’s version. “It’s a pilgrimage of pain,” he said to me over the phone one night from Phoenix, “and I find little of interest in this vast Christian country of yours.”

He took to doodling on the hotel stationary, little cartoons that reflected his moods and his readings. Most of these drawings have been lost (he claims to have made over seven-hundred) but a few have surfaced and reveal themselves to be quite charming.