THE GENTLE SIDE OF CURRADO MALASPINA

When idle, bored and without my cell-phone I often find myself wondering why so many adults are so disconsolately messed up. Why do citizens of the prosperous West dwell so habitually in dissatisfaction and angst.

I recently learned that my good friend, Currado Malaspina, a friend who shares with me a near permanent state of perplexity and disappointment, attended a seminar at the Paris Center for Intentional Living (Centre de Paris pour l'existence intentionelle) in order to see for himself what it is that is eating all these fortunate people.

Aside from the typical poverty of juvenescent hugs, it seems that regular honest and well meaning folks are simply bored with their prosperity. There seems to be a universal craving for programmed disobedience. Living by the conventional rubrics of work, love and leisure, by the time a person reaches the age of about 45 they begin to realize that they are singularly unexceptional.

What makes things worse, these same sad civilians lack the imagination to find the easily accessible consolations of great art and literature.

At the Center for Intentional Living dentists, career office workers and accounts managers are regularly told how génial! they are. Currado tells me that they often actually use the word 'awesome' in English as if this all purpose platitude finds greater potency than all the available French equivalents.

This stubborn hunger for salvation is a cash cow and although the French government has effectively banned more than a few so-called 'personal actualization' outfits in the past, they keep springing up like truffles after a summer rain.

The typically skeptical Malaspina was so moved by what he saw that he has completely changed the nature and purpose of his work.

His new theme comes with a simple, urgent message:

Love your kids and do everything you can to make them confident, independent and above all, mutinous and willfully defiant!

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.

TOUGH GUY SHOWS HEART

"In a world of increasing ambivalence, why do we persist in making art?"

That was the question, practically barked from the back of the packed auditorium, that put my friend Currado Malaspina into a meditative trance.

He was delivering a lecture as part of his responsibilities as a visiting artist at The School of Visual Arts in New York and though the question was pretty boilerplate art student fare it provoked in Currado a momentary regression into genuine introspection.

I know for a fact that he has been asking himself a similar question after suffering a prolonged drought in motivation. "The days just seem to repeat themselves," he recently complained to me in a rare text message, "studio, sex, food, drink, studio, studio. I feel like a grazing buffalo growing lecherous and lethargic with empty habit."

Poor guy.

After a few long, uncomfortable minutes he looked up at the crowded room and with what seemed to those in attendance as an uncharacteristic moment of sincerity he came up with the following answer.

"We persist in making art for the same reason why we continue to fill our nights with dreams. For if we didn't we would most certainly descend into a state of despondency, madness and grief."

ROMANTICISM IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL SOCIAL MEDIA

My friend Currado Malaspina surrounds himself with a militia of wily women who, through an asymmetrical and difficult to describe kinship, deploy a malevolent force that share many of the same characteristics as electrical storms and storm drain floods.

I realize right away that I have not really shed any light on anything. An electrical storm and a storm drain flood seem on the surface to have only the word storm in common and therefore the analogies are, if not misleading then at least sloppy and over-written. But I can do no better than this and from a compulsion that I don't wholly comprehend, I insist upon these analogies.

I suppose the motif of mild disaster is what I have in mind. A man his age has no business getting involved, much less falling in love with these young beauties and one would think that after a few torrid trysts and wretched break-ups the man's stamina for pain might ebb. But no, we're talking here of an eternal man-child. The birds peck at his sleeve and he remains aloof to his own suffering and exposure.

Like an electrical storm there is volatility, excitement and the thrill of immanent danger that surround his dalliances. And like an inundated drain, there's filthy muck that the deluge must drudge up.

His muddled addiction to beauty is intoxicatingly toxic and if one reads carefully the cryptic annotations on his Baba Kama Sutra drawings it becomes clear that he himself is as addled as the rest of us.

I can no longer count how many times Currado, with tears in his eyes, returns to the refrain of our forsaken fate."Nous sommes seuls au monde," "the universe has disowned us and through its renunciation we are left to drift in misery and permanent exile."

This is how he explains his preoccupation with sex. "There are many worthy subjects but only two that are of any interest to me: Death and duress."

I can't decide if what he's saying is creepy or profound.  What I do know is that Currado Malaspina is uncomfortably raw and brutal in his honesty. To me, that is what is redeeming in his fatally grotesque work. 

These latest drawings are no doubt a requiem to a fading hope. They are neither wistful nor mournful but merely a gentle token from a lost time when people still had the ability to be physically, sensually and meaningfully connected.   

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS BAD PUBLICITY?

My good friend Currado Malaspina is no stranger to controversy but each time he runs afoul of the custodians of good taste he reacts with the stupefaction of a waif tugging on Santa's beard.

Improbable as it seems, he thinks of himself as an abstract painter in the tradition of a Miro or a Mondrian or a Pollock or a Still. With all his loaded subject matter, Currado believes that the primacy of form is his only guiding principle.

This, of course, is laughable.

Sure, when his work is flipped upside down and seen from afar through a cloudy lens I suppose the shapes and colors all add up into a coherent whole. But please, if ever there were an explicit narrative designed to offend it's in his gorgeously smutty Baba Kama Sutra.

For all his pretenses and justifications this stuff is denigrating, not only to women but to the basic concept of respectable lechery. 

The work has been widely reproduced and predictably the public's reaction has been outrage, vilification and disgust. 

Strange as it sounds this never fails to hurt Malaspina's feelings. I can't really tell if he's being sincere but he claims that all he wants is a fair hearing in order to explain his ideas. 

Well Canada has come to the rescue and he will finally have a chance to mollify his many bitter critics.

CKCC, as part of its ongoing series of profiles and interviews with international artists will devote a full hour to Malaspina's provocative book. It will be an uphill battle for my besieged colleague since the network, with an eye toward ratings, loaded the dice with this very unflattering full page advertisement.

Having known Malaspina for as long as I have I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

But then again, I love him.

And then again ...  I'm not a woman.