Conjugating in the Visionary Passé Composé

There's a hideous beauty behind the tasteless work of my good friend Currado Malaspina. It holds the interest like an irregular heartbeat - it's far from fatal but it surely can't be healthy.

At a time where in all likelihood we will be electing our first woman president, Currado depicts his female accomplices as if they were mere accessories. Is it a last, desperate gasp at les temps perdu or is there laced between his puddles of color some vague irony or social commentary?

At times his women are delicate and lovely. At other times they are monstrous and grotesque. Is he evoking the fleeting melancholy of Villon's famous Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière?

Or the degrading braggadocio of H. Hefner's Little Black Book?

The critics, splayed into predictable factions, are unhelpfully inconclusive. Like most things Currado, a morass of divisive speculation only serves to obfuscate his true intentions. In interviews he remains coy, engulfing himself in a highly marketable ambiguity where any given statement could be subject to a myriad of interpretations.

In the end it really doesn't matter. Despite his fame in France, Currado will remain a marginal figure in our hyper-sensitive, politically correct contemporary American art scene. I will leave it to the next generation and its inevitable sexual grievances to evaluate my friend's work with greater insight and objectivity.

AN ARGUMENT FOR LITERACY

Though my base and depraved friend Currado Malaspina is no stranger to a Lothario's divan, it can also be said that he succeeds rather handsomely in attracting the most intelligent, literate and articulate of mistresses.

This is no small accomplishment, for his conquests are uniformly gorgeous and to find looks and brains within the same gentle specimen is no meager feat.

Of course, this is almost certainly a byproduct of his scrupulous methodologies. Your average rake may wine and dine, flatter and flirt, cajole and caress and shower in gifts but for Currado seduction always begins with books.

What woman could possibly resist a first edition of Coindreau's translation of The Sound and The Fury, (La bruit et la fureur, Gallimard 1938)? And is there any greater aphrodisiac than Antonin Artaud's rare 1947 masterpiece Artaud le Mômô?

Short of a 40 foot yacht and a romantic penthouse pied-à-terre on the Île de la Cité, I can think of no greater lubricant to love.

My old bones grow weary just imagining the rigor of his amatory appetites. The reading alone would exhaust my endurance.

But to Currado sex is sport and though Sade can be found among his folios and tomes, he regularly refers to the tamer treatises in steering his roaming shaft.

Breton's Nadja, Souppault's Les dernières nuits de Paris, Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy and Carpentier's La viuda domesticado.

He's a relic and a knave that Currado is but somehow he manages to live in a fictive world unchanged since the twenties when artists were feared and esteemed and lived poorly and free.

IT MUST BE TIME TO EXHALE

How does one begin to explain an artist, a man, an intellectual of the traditional French Left who spends the lion's share of his time passing off trifling doodles depicting himself in his trademark white blazer and Christmas green woolen scarf standing in the company of young, naked, beautiful women?

Surely these little cartoons aren't meant to be read as a chronicle of actual events! And if they are, why is a man, formally esteemed for his urbanity and discretion, displaying such a coarse disregard for his female protagonists?

Are we to conclude that these trifles now constitute the sum of Currado's current oeuvre? Has he slipped and descended into the tedium of memoir? Have his pictorial skills declined to such a degree that all we can expect are insipid fantasies and monotonous aggrandizement?

Or could it be that these graphic bagatelles are meant to be ironic. More than one critic has advanced this far-fetched thesis.

Georgette Octave as recently as last week wrote in the arts journal  Compte vraiment le quotidien that Malaspina may be the strongest feminist voice within the contemporary discourse.

Invoking an archaic metaphor from the Second Republic she proposes that "his old coffee seems strangely new." (Son vieux café semble étrangement nouvelle). She goes on to describe how 'nimbly' Currado deconstructs the threadbare, formulaic conceptions of droit du seigneur. 

Maybe yes, maybe no but one thing is certain. If the infamous roué, Currado Malaspina can persuade radical and strident women within the academy and the press that he's on their side of the barricades then he more than deserves his legendary reputation as the consummate charmer.