The Italian artist Mr Fidia Falaschetti says it’s probably the best deal that he’s ever made. A US collector didn’t want to pay in cash for Falaschetti’s latest work. Instead, he wanted, somewhat unconventionally in the art world, to do a trade: one new painting for one Rolex Daytona, straight from his wrist. Did Falaschetti hesitate?

“Oh my god,” he laughs, still not quite believing it. “I think the painting was priced at around US$14,000, and, two years later, I think it was worth around $22,000. By then the Daytona was at about $35,000. That was a very good deal. It’s one of those collectible pieces, an asset like a work of art, but one I get to bring with me everywhere. I wouldn’t ever get rid of it. But it’s good to know I could cash it out in an emergency. Or if I saw a piece of art I like…”

The son of art teachers, Falaschetti says his leanings towards art were a given – not least because he was named after one of the titans of Greek sculpture. He attended art school in Italy, starting his career as an illustrator and graphic designer. In 2007, he decided to focus full-time on his fine art practice with the emphasis on ready-mades and sculpture, often monumental in scale.

It was after moving to Los Angeles eight years later that he found his métier, channelling street art, hip-hop culture and branding design, notably iconic figures from the entertainment and corporate worlds – think Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse – that Falaschetti twists in often dark and comically surreal ways. The kind of stuff that appeals, it turns out, to the likes of Messrs Justin Bieber and Robert Downey Jnr.

“My main goal was never to make money with art, but to open a conversation about this crazy world we live in, to make pop – as in popular – art,” says Falaschetti, whose works can be found in the permanent collections of Amsterdam’s Moco Museum and New York’s Spyscape Museum.

“I think people like it because it’s funny and not so hard to understand, though I hope there are layers there,” he says. “So much conceptual art now requires you to read pages and pages of explanation. But you should be free to develop your own thoughts [around artworks], to have a dialogue with them. Advertising imagery does that fantastically, gets its messages across very effectively, so I like the idea of bringing that to art.”

And he certainly puts the hours into doing that. Falaschetti works late into the early hours of each morning – that’s when he’s at his creatively most lucid, he says. “Though I’m not all about work-work-work,” insists the almost-50-year-old. “Work is a pleasure and yet it still seems 80 per cent of my time is spent not doing creative things, working on production and so on. And as I get older, I don’t know how it is that time passes so fast. It feels like yesterday that I moved to the US.”

That idea is creeping into his work, too. “Ass Throw Boy”, his funny but also vaguely nightmarish sculptural spin on the classic Japanese anime character Astro Boy, normally comes in gleaming, high-shine metals. However, the latest editions come in copper-coated resin, and will oxidise over time. “You know nothing is permanent, but I like that Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, of accepting imperfection, impermanence, the marks of time,” Falaschetti says. “I tend to wear my watches when I work, so they get scratched up a bit, too, but I don’t mind that for the same reason. I like how they’re a visual reminder of time passing that is always part of you.”

But watches appeal to Falaschetti first and foremost as sculptural objects. Indeed, he says he’s probably worn one every day since he was five: first a watch made of marble, then a Casio G-Shock, a western-inspired Winchester watch and then a Citizen that his grandmother bought him. When he felt that he had established himself as an artist, he bought himself an Omega Seamaster. “That still has sentimental value to me because it’s symbolic of the time I realised that, after all the struggles, I could finally make money from art,” he says of the latter. Then his day-to-day watch, a limited-edition Speedmaster. Finally came that Rolex.

“They’re all little works of art,” he says. “I get obsessed with the way things are produced, their build quality. Watches can be made at a level that’s insane. But then, I love accessories – I can dress quite plainly, but then I’m all about beautiful shoes, glasses, hat and watch. You know, I’m an Italian man. We like to think about our outfits. I don’t wear rings or chains, but I do like to have a watch on. You’ve got to have a watch.”