THE LAST OF THE GREAT FLÂNEURS

My dear, eccentric comrade Currado Malaspina, is a relic. He has no cell phone and therefore, no Google Maps. His complete absence from life online has given him no other alternative than to adhere to actual, physical existence. Without texting apparatus or email he is forced to communicate (he is comfortable in at least four languages) with articulated words spoken in full or near-full sentences.

His attention span is still intact and his memory is unfailing. Though he owns a bicycle, he prefers to walk.

As he walks, on occasion he stops, and when he stops he sketches.

Above is an old accordion notebook annotated in english. 

 

The Sweet Guide - La Dolce Guida. Dante & Malaspina

BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE

 

Unlike many of my New York colleagues, my good friend, the French artist Currado Malaspina loves Los Angeles. He visits the city religiously twice a year (though he rarely lets me know he's in town, preferring to spend his time with a bevy of sycophants, art collectors and Hollywood B-listers).

Knowing that both California and his native Paris are doomed to climate catastrophe, he has taken it upon himself to chronicle every detail of each city with some form of visual representation.

The video above is just one of the hundreds of sketchbooks he has devoted to this sanguine lamentation.  

THE SWEET GUIDE

 

I've often wondered what animates my dear, eccentric comrade Currado Malaspina. He has many strange habits and obsessions. He wears scarves in summer, he collects wind chimes and garden ornaments and he reads and rereads Dante in Italian without understanding a word.

His latest folly is imagining Beatrice Portinari as a celestial seducer luring an earnest and vulnerable Alighieri into spasms of desire. His illuminated Paradiso which he impishly titled "La Dolce Guida," is weird and beautiful.

Though still far from finished, we can get an idea of what it might look like by this misleading video:

Paris and Los Angeles: Sister Cities Not Exactly On Speaking Terms

My good friend Currado Malaspina loves to walk. In Paris, this is not unusual. It is not even unusual to interrupt a walk in order to make a few sketches. In Paris, Malaspina is a sparrow in a tree.

Los Angeles is something else. Walking in Los Angeles, though far from a felony, is still something rather freakish. Combine that with squatting on a curb with pen and ink, and you've got yourself an anomaly.

Luckily, squatting on a curb in L.A. is a commonplace and as long as Currado is not publicly defecating, folks leave him alone. 

IN EXCHANGE FOR WORDS

The tragedy of Currado Malaspina is too petty, too puerile, too insignificant to serve as a cautionary tale. Malaspina is a silly, gifted man. His reputation in France has never suffered from his serial scandals. Quite the contrary. But to American sensibilities, his chest-thumping maleness is a putrid remnant of a discredited time.

 

Perhaps this graphic record will suffice.

WATER(COLOR) UNDER THE BRIDGE

My dear colleague, the French artist Currado Malaspina, is not the most tactful person I know. We met years ago at a conference in Lyon that had something to do with contemporary European painting and he made a deep impression upon me.

He was no more likable then, then he is now.

At the time he had just inherited the directorship of this oddball, neo-Dada artist collective called The Plausible Deniability Project™ (PDP™). He heart wasn't in it. He passed most of the leadership responsibilities to the California painter Dahlia Danton, an artist of modest ability known mostly for her conspicuous indifference to irony. Benefiting from the prestige the republic of France inexplicably grants to loud men in positions of authority, Malaspina turned PDP™ into a lightening rod for Twitter-ready controversy.

His luck may have run out.

"Malaspina est annulé," is the latest headline in the Parisian art press. It seems that some were triggered by his latest show at Valéry Contemporain. 

I'm curious. Perhaps there's more to the story than these trifling little watercolors.