The last 18 months of Currado Malaspina’s life were spent in solitude and obscurity. Shamed into silence, (that in itself is a notable achievement for a French man), scorned by the public and abandoned by his friends, Malaspina withered like a vine.
At least those are the facts as we know them.
But like all facts, there are plenty of alternatives.
The variation I gravitate toward the most is the one that has Currado retiring to the Dodecanese Islands where he lives with his two cats Pèlleas and Mélisande. I prefer this to the pathetic image of Malaspina sitting in his cramped kitchen hunched over Le Monde and nibbling on soggy day-old croissants[1].
Another theory puts Currado in southern California where he is attempting to replicate his flânerie on the unaccommodating streets of Los Angeles.
I even heard a rumor that he changed his name to Augustus Szapiro and is publishing a weekly column in the Stijl section of the Dutch periodical Esthetiek en ideeën.
What gives all these theories a modicum of credibility is that aside from a short announcement in L’Humanité, Malaspina’s death went virtually unnoticed. There was no formal funeral or memorial service, no public acknowledgement from the Ministry of Culture, no obituaries in the mainstream press, not even any statement from his former gallery. The only ‘real’ evidence of Malaspina’s death came in the form of mean-spirited chatter on social media and an empty Cité de l’Ameublement apartment.
I went to Paris in the summer of 2025 in order to visit that apartment. I knocked on the door of the concierge, a spry octogenarian named Simone, who welcomed me as if I were a prodigal nephew. She offered little in the way of concrete information but was cordial enough to serve me tea and biscuits while regaling me in her own particular form of Curradology.
I learned from Simone that Malaspina, though notably diminished, would still take his café au lait at the local Tabac. She said that he would always come home with his fingers stained in multi-colored ink. She was constantly wiping away the blue or red or pink fingerprints he left on the light switches in the stairwell. She showed me a few small sketchbooks that were left behind in his apartment after he abruptly moved out. She eagerly accepted the three-hundred euro I offered for the lot of them. She certainly had no idea what they might have been worth.
The contents of these sketchbooks had an eerie coherence. Unsurprisingly, they were obsessive. They focused on one particular woman of a certain age who seems to be carefully observed from a distance. There is nothing untoward in Malaspina’s renderings but they are unmistakably compulsive.
[1] This is, in fact, a fair description of a photograph, taken by a paparazzo and published in L’art oscure in February 2025
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