“New York is a good environment for detailed, painstaking paintings,” says Ry Fyan,  “because it’s the opposite of what’s supposed to be done.” Fyan, a 29-year-old, New York–based artist, will have his first solo show, “I Can Give You What You Want,” at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in February.

Fyan has never done the done thing in fact, but it always seems to turn out for the best: he spent his adolescence on skateboards and painting graffiti just before they got cool, and as an undergrad dismissed his professors’ advice to lurk at openings to instead spend his nights with a group of delinquents who became art world causes célèbres—think New York mag cover story.

After graduation Fyan supported himself as a weed deliveryman, but over the next five years was courted then dropped by several galleries. After a bike accident in 2006 followed by a fortuitous meeting with art dealer Perry Rubenstein, Fyan gave up running drugs and started to make a living off his work. His paintings are mostly concerned with the mysterious and godlike power of quotidian things like dish soap and toothpaste. “I make spells over the effigies of objects,” he explains. “to get to their spiritual bottom. Because objects are now points of worship.” They are biting but oblique comments inflected by drug culture, and with the sensibility of an outsider looking in.