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 …

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.

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

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.

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’

VACANCE

Paysage 14, Currado Malaspina, 2013

Every August, like every decent citizen of the Republic, Currado Malaspina heads south to the famous French regions of leisure and repose. For one full month he manages to forget that he is Malaspina the provocateur and becomes the gentleman that still manages to lie nascent within him.

Gone are the skanky silhouettes of sweat and steamy sex that have become the Malaspina brand. Summer is the time to spread the stiff legs of a workman’s easel and get busy sur le motif.

Paysage 21, Currado Malaspina, 2013

In August what stands erect for Currado Malaspina are Aleppo pines, scrubby holm oak and groves and groves of olive trees. His pictures are redolent with the suggestive scents of anémone des jardins, seven-leaf cardamine, cowslip and clove.

August is when Currado becomes the true, virtuous romantic, free from the flagrant puerility that has earned him his name.

I love to visit Currado in the summer. His house just outside of Bonnieux is an oasis of courtly refinement and European civility.

And he never lets me lift a finger.