Take a look at Andy Dixon’s paintings, and it’s clear that while having a lot of fun (the bright pink! the glaring logos! the rambunctious subject matter!), the artist is also clearly making a point. The Vancouver-born-and-bred artist (he splits his time between his hometown and New York and is soon making the move to Los Angeles) started his career, as a teen no less, as a successful punk musician. Now he paints subjects that reflect on the bourgeois lifestyle—lavish interiors, knock-off Chanel and Versace clothing, neon simulacra of Old Masters, polo matches—in washes of bright colors. His raison d’être? To examine the aesthetics of value and what we deem to be expensive, including the luxury objects he’s making himself: his paintings.

We visited Dixon in his Vancouver studio, where he greeted us in a signature pastel suit (a version of which he wears every day), and talked to him about how he landed on a Nike sweatsuit as his painting uniform of choice, why he thinks Gucci’s Alessandro Michele is a genius, and how his patron, Charlotte Dellal, is helping him with his latest project.