Detroit’s Mexicantown during the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration weekend is a sea of colorful flags, cars in gridlock, and festive music. It’s an atmosphere rich with culture and urban grit and as residents reveled in the cultural celebrations in Clark Park, I made my way through police tape and detectives to Mark Dancey’s house and studio to discuss his latest works for the show Volandismo. “This feels like a scene from The Wire,” I thought to myself while walking up to his porch. And while witnessing this scene from his perch in his second floor studio of his home, Dancey tells me he had been thinking the same. And so began my discussion with Dancey about how classic oil painting and pop culture meet in the form of his latest paintings.

In chatting with Dancey about his influences and how he developed his technique it’s immediately clear that his curiosity and enthusiasm for learning are abundant. His references range from Russian constructivism and Mayan art (which largely influenced his graphic design style) to El Greco, from visits to the Prado Museum in Madrid to one memorable night in Mexico City. He absorbs all of these things, and like any perceptive artist, draws on all of these experiences and influences in creating his work.

Widely known for his graphic design work and as a publisher of the subversive popular culture magazine Motorbooty. Dancey cut his teeth in graphic design while a psychology student at the University of Michigan, designing flyers to promote his punk band. Though he has no formal training in the fine arts, his graphic design career has included rock album cover art, concert posters and flyers and contributions to mass market consumer magazines like Details, Spin and GQ. Oil painting, however, is something he pursued later in his career, at a time when he felt he could devote the necessary amount of patience and discipline to study the technique and craft of oil painting.

Tipped off by an artist friend, Dancey studied the minute details of works by the masters of oil, including Jan Van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer. In their work, he identified a “blueprint to oil”—sketching before layering paint onto the board or canvas—and thereby bridged a technical and conceptual gap between his graphic design practice, in which he focused meticulously on perfecting lines in 2 colors, and the complexities of capturing light, perspective and layered colors in oil painting.

“I’ve tried to learn from just studying those guys and learn from their graphic drawings. I don’t do the drawing on the board like they did, the carefully shaded things, but I do a pretty tight drawing ahead of time on paper and then transfer it onto the [material]. I try to go from hard lines…and put transparent layers on top of that,” Dancey explains.

In spite of his wide ranging references, Dancey feels there’s no need to reinvent what the classical artists did, to reopen their exploration of reflective light, the human form and transparent layers of oils. He uses the history of the medium to lay a foundation for his own painting. While his technique follows that of classical oil painting masters, his work is undeniably infused with his own influences, creating a unique language that is homage to both classicism and modern popular cultural influences like punk rock and TV.

Dancey says on his fresh take on classical style: “That’s the best I can do. It’s me, Mr. 20th Century punk rock, TV...all that stuff, pop culture. …It’s me trying to learn later to use the technique and materials discovered and mastered by Van Eyck and Durer.”

The series of paintings in Volandismo, a term that references the study of flightology or the artistic expression of angels, saints and flying things, presents fresh approaches to mythological stories, using round paintings, forced perspective and the female nude to invoke the angelic “flight” of classical subjects. Dancey’s choice of mythological themes is, in part, a reaction to his years of publishing and conceptualizing Motorbooty, each issue of which lampooned the most popular cultural references of the time, thereby giving it a short lifespan as a cultural critique.

“To be critical of pop culture you have to know about it, you have to follow it and you may as well be a fan of it… You can never keep up with it, it’s like fashion. Even to appoint yourself as a satirical critic of [popular culture], you can’t keep up with it. It’s just not worth it.

This whole thing is a complete reaction against that. There’s no fashionable thing or even contemporary thing [in Volandismo], it’s just like “what stories are the oldest stories there are?”. No one is going to criticize me if I’m doing some old mythological themes because artists have always done that.”

With the faint sounds of Detroit’s Cinco de Mayo festivities filtering in through the open windows of his Mexicantown home, Dancey affirms, “ [My background] is naturally going to come through…the Michigan and Detroit thing. It’s not [me] self consciously trying to make a Detroit thing. It’s trying to make something that is less ephemeral. If I’m going to spend all this time working on something, I’ll work on something that is not going to [become] dated. If you’re going to spend all this time, you don’t want it to be this fleeting thing.”

Volandismo, New Paintings by Mark Dancey opens at Re:View Contemporary on June 13 with a reception from 7-11pm.