Price: 1500 EUR
I met with the energy of this demon many years before I met and worked with The True Mayhem.
Three decades ago, when I had the first encounter with De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ music, I did not see the original cover. I saw a very low-quality photocopied cover, further damaged by overscale, as it was taken most probably from a magazine and forced to fit in a cassette cover.
This was my first interaction with Black Metal. So, for a fascinated 12-year-old kid that was way more than a cultural shock. I did not know the band, I had zero information about that Metal subgenre, and everything looked and sounded like it was being brought from another dimension. I did not imagine some metalheads drinking beer and recording this album in a studio, I was rather imagining some entities coming from another dimension and bringing from there the knowledge of expressing all these ghostly and unimaginable landscapes, events and worlds. I could literally imagine that the cassette had been magically brought into this world by an ultra-weird manifestation of the unknown.
All these feelings led the kid I was to draw the cover, trying to understand the shape of the logo and the elements of the image in order to replicate it and even have a typo in the title by the overdose of adrenaline. I consider this experience and the initial impressions left by the album’s sound and music (together with being my first encounter with Black Metal and having the lack of information on top of everything created in my mind and soul) one of the most intense events of my life. So, 30 years later (15 of them proudly working with Mayhem, doing tons of stuff like official videos, animations, merchandise designs, covers, stage designs and screenings), as I re-discover how intense, powerful and creatively explosive were my first experiences and the perspectives I had of this mysterious and fascinating musical genre called Extreme Metal, I came with the idea of express all this through a painting. The base of this painting, of this study and case, was the cassette cover I drew 30 years ago, not the original album cover.
I went back in time to access the experience of the strange encounter, to access that explosive creative energy and excitement that abducted me back then to a magical dimension in which I remain to this day. What you see is the result of materializing that energy into a real painting, while keeping the subject of the album and incorporating technical prowess and understanding of the energy of the band—gathered during the years I worked with them.
This painting is a tribute and a celebration to the power of the manifestation of passion. I created it using acrylic colors on canvas (the three-dimensional feel is given also using acrylics). All this time, I thought the painting should show me, the kid I was and the Mayhem demon celebrating what we brought into this dimension together. But the cover of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas was the portal and an alibi.
