They have names like Go Wake Up, or Kinsky—they are large canvases propped up against the wall of his recording studio in Valldemossa on the Spanish Balearic Island of Mallorca. Whenever he needs a break from the monotonous repetition of beats during the music-production process, he moves to his painting studio and reaches for colors. There are artists like Mimmo Paladino, who chooses an aesthetic approach and applies paint with force and clinical precision to the canvas. Others, like Hermann Nitsch, make color splatter and splash through the room, drenching canvases in deep hues of yellow or red.
It gets messy. Parov Stelar, 44, is probably closer aligned with the Hermann Nitsch faction: “The process of painting has an earthy quality for me. It gets messy. In the recording studio, everything is clean, and once you finished a piece of work, you switch off the computer, without anything tangible in your hand—just an mp3 file of music that you send yourself via mail. Sometimes, the lack of a concrete object makes me feel something is missing.” The story is entirely different when the artist leaves his painting studio: “You leave the space, your muscles ache from heavy use of the spatula, everything is dirty, and you turn the whole flat into a mess. But you end up with something concrete, tangible, and that is very important to me.”
Everything is clean in the recording studio, and once the work is done, you‘re left empty-handed. Painting is a mess, your muscles hurt from using the spatula, and you end the day with a concrete work. And that is very important to me.
