Naleye on memory, structure and life after noise.

He had graduated from high school in Maastricht early, at fifteen, and the following year moved to Amsterdam to connect with his father, Sultan Naleye Buddista, an eco-entrepreneur and artist of mixed Somalian-Vietnamese heritage. There, Naleye also connected with an Amsterdam DJ collective, and together they relocated to New York City, playing at legendary nightspots like Le Bain and The Box, to rooftops, basements and pop-ups.

He was just 19 when he arrived in the city. Before he found a place of his own, Naleye crashed at Curtis Kulig’s loft above La Esquina. He describes summers in the city as combustible. Downtown was the office; the benches on the corner of Kenmare and Lafayette as the boardroom – a crossroad where energy circulated before it made headlines. The early days of the A$AP movement; conversations with Matthew Williams before ALYX was a global code; moments with Heron Preston and Florencia Galarza; crossings with Virgil Abloh before the institutions caught up; throwing pop-up festivals for the United Nations with Kweku Mandela, grandson of Nelson. It wasn’t networking. It was proximity to ignition. No one fully understood what it would become – but the frequency was undeniable.

Over a decade in front of the camera, Naleye had also begun to experiment with being behind it, and it was the morning after a night out in 2021 when he woke up to a series of messages asking all sorts of questions about a self-portrait he’d taken on an iPhone 5 and posted to Instagram. That unrecognised number belonged to Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who ended his messages with one last question: could Naleye come to Paris to meet him?

And sure enough, that evening Naleye flew to Paris, where he ended up living in a hotel with Ye for the next six months. It was during that time in Paris that Ye noted Naleye’s exceptional sensitivity to colour, not simply in selecting hues but in gauging emotional temperature. Naleye was invited deeper into Ye’s core creative orbit to work alongside stylist Ras Bartram and film director Arnaud Bresson. Together, they helped shape the visual atmosphere surrounding Donda 2, and collaborated on the visual development, specifically contributing to the color palettes, tonal direction of music videos such as Heaven and Hell, and Hurricane. Naleye’s instinct for tone as language, and shade as narrative, also extended into the colour palette of the broader YEEZY universe, informing collaborations with Balenciaga, Gap Inc., and Adidas, and the restrained saturation that defined the era.

Between bites of nasi ayam, Naleye describes that period as life in fast-forward, a 24/7 apprenticeship inside a cultural engine. Of being part of a constellation of minds operating in sync, largely under the radar, on new Ye-ventures across the world; the Free Larry Hoover Benefit Concert with Drake; the Donda 2 Listening Experience in Miami, and the weekly Sunday Service Choir gatherings, where he helped translate the spiritual into spatial and visual form. Naleye speaks of that chapter of his life with deep gratitude for the trust placed in him, and for the opportunity to grow alongside a team that shaped moments now embedded in contemporary culture.

So, how does the now 36-year-old Naleye find himself living in Bali with his beautiful family, dividing his time between painting, the platform Love Racing he founded to incubate collaborations between music and Formula 1, and the role of Creative Director for Syd (formerly known as Syd tha Kid from Odd Future and The Internet)? It’s clear that Naleye has lived a life ahead of his years, but because of the constant drone coming from the scooters passing our corner, it’s hard to hear his softly American-accented answers. So, we jump on the back of the Honda Adv Naleye has rigged up with his surfboard racks, and head to his studio to talk about his painting processes and how they relate to the landscapes of his life.

When did you start painting? 

I started painting seriously in the last few years. Before that, I was building worlds through experiences for musicians and brands – large systems, big rooms, and constant noise. But when my brother passed away, everything slowed down. His passing was the catalyst that made me pick up a brush. Painting became something quiet and personal. A way to sit with grief without needing to explain it. A way to accept his decision to leave us and choose the light. There wasn’t a grand plan behind it. It just felt like the most honest language available to me.

What are your paintings about? What are the main pillars, or themes, that they explore?

They’re about memory and structure. They’re about how environments shape us, and how silence holds emotion. Most of my work sits between architecture and feeling. The pillars are memory, stillness, systems, absence and restraint. I remove more than I add. I’m trying to create spaces you can enter.

How does painting help process grief?

Painting slows you down enough to feel things you usually avoid. Grief doesn’t always come out as tears. Sometimes it comes out as texture. Layers. Erasing. Rebuilding. It’s less about expressing grief and more about sitting with it. Letting it exist on the canvas allows the love around the grief to get bigger.

What meaning does architecture hold in your work?

To me, architecture is memory compressed into structure. The buildings I reference, Bedstuy housing projects, Manhattan office buildings, Tokyo towers, are emotional containers. They hold people’s lives, their migration stories, their struggles, their survival, their intimacies. My paintings are like fragments of those structures – the feeling of standing inside them.

The negative space between the grids makes me think of buildings’ windows; do they each represent a life, a soul?

The empty spaces are just as important as the painted parts. They’re pauses. Breath. Silence. Sometimes I think of them as the unseen lives inside those buildings, the people behind windows you never meet, the private stories, the migrants, the invisible labour, my father’s journey, millions of others. But I don’t want to illustrate that directly. It’s more about presence through absence – letting space speak.

Who, or what, are some of the key influences in your painting practice?

African textiles for rhythm and pattern. Japanese architecture for restraint and proportion. Street grids and city maps. Brutalist housing. Mark Rothko for emotional depth through reduction. And, honestly, silence – silence is probably my biggest influence.

Is there a relationship between music and painting in your practice?

My background is rooted in music culture, so rhythm naturally influences how I work. I think in layers and structure. Repetition, pacing, restraint. That carries directly into the paintings. Most of the time, I create in silence, and some days with very minimal or ambient sound. Nothing lyrical or distracting. The painting should set its own tempo.

What does a typical painting day in Bali look like?

Well, it’s very physical. I usually start with movement, gym or boxing. After that, meditation, to sit for 20, 30 minutes – it’s the first thing I do when I get into the studio. Then, I paint for long stretches without my phone. Bali gives me space to move between those states: body, mind, and work. It keeps everything human.

What drew you to Bali? What keeps you there, and what has it given you?

Bali slows things down in a good way. Life here is simpler and more grounded; it removes a lot of unnecessary noise from the creative process. There’s less performance, less distraction – more presence. It gives me the mental space to focus and actually improve my work. Geographically, it also gives me an advantage. Being in the East Asian time zone means I can dedicate my mornings and early afternoons to painting and training my craft without interruptions. Then, as the West wakes up, I shift into calls and projects. So, I’m able to do both; that balance would be much harder somewhere else. I think that’s why so many creatives stay here. It allows you to live differently, with more depth and intention.

And before you started painting, where did you find the most substance and meaning?

In building creative ecosystems. In helping artists and ideas become real. But that work was always external. Painting is internal; it’s the first practice that feels completely mine. No client. No deadline. No outcome. Just truth.

You knew Virgil Abloh for nearly a decade. Would you consider him a mentor?

Virgil was a mentor through example. He showed us how to move freely across disciplines and build systems without asking permission. Architecture, fashion, music, design, all part of the same system. It was less mentorship and more lineage.

What have been some of the most important lessons from working with Ye?

Working with Ye changed how I understand scale. He thinks in worlds. Nothing is incremental – everything is built at full size from the start. His decisions come from instinct and conviction. Being around that taught me two things very clearly: commit fully, and own everything. Own your ideas. Own your IP. Own the structure around your work. That mindset shaped how I build today.

Your paintings draw so much from past memories, but what would you like to focus on in the future?

More depth and larger scale. To create physical spaces where people can experience the work slowly: studios, galleries, places for silence. I want the work to feel like architecture you can walk into.