“Maybe the spinach is art,” mused Jeff Koons of his Popeye series of paintings. Then he reconsidered: “Maybe art is the spinach.”

The American artist, speaking at the opening of the first major exhibition of his work at an English public gallery, was pushed to elaborate on the significance of the spinach, which gives the cartoon sailor his superhuman strength.

Koons explained that the tinned vegetable represented “how transforming the power of art is in any individual life. It’s the ability for transcendence.”

The artist, famed for his unabashed delight in kitsch, gives Popeye and his consort Olive Oyl a starring role in the collection of paintings on display at the Serpentine Gallery, West London.

At the heart of the sculptures, meanwhile, are what appear to be giant inflatable children’s beach toys. The works are in fact made of cast aluminium, meticulously painted for an unsettling resemblance to real inflatables.

Anyone getting too near the works will be warned off by anxious attendants, for these are very valuable toys indeed. One of Koons’s works sold for a record $23.6 million (£14 million) two years ago and he is one of the most influential contemporary artists in the world.

His brash embrace of consumerism, sex and pop culture have made him an inspiration to the Young British Artists and detested by many others. Yesterday, though, he claimed only to be interested in the mind-altering power of art.

“I want the viewer to come into contact with the work and to feel that everything about their life in that moment is perfect,” he said. “Their history, their culture, everything is perfect. Any desire that they have, I hope they do feel a sense of it heightened.”

He gestured to a nearby sculpture of a large inflatable lobster perched atop an giant wastepaper basket. “The toys are very optimistic. In our own lives we’re inflatable — we take a breath, that’s a symbol of optimism,” he explained.

And how exactly does Popeye fit into all this? The artist explained with reference to the character’s stubborn catchphrase, “I yam what I yam”. “It’s this self acceptance,” Koons said. “Acceptance is the ultimate state of being. It’s like being a sponge and dipping in that glass of water.”

The genesis of the Popeye paintings was a print by the early 19th-century English botanist Robert John Thornton which hangs in Koons’s home. “One evening I thought, ‘I want to see the lobster come down from the top of that print. And OK that’s it, that’s going to be wonderful.’

“And so I went to the studio and I put the lobster there, but it just didn’t do it. It wasn’t able to finish itself. And I just listened to myself and that’s when Popeye came on. You know, put Popeye there!”

Koons topped off the work with references to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, and the series had begun. “I don’t believe you can create art. The only thing you can do is follow your instincts,” he said. “The works don’t believe in judgments. Everything is perfect.”

One of Koons’s most famous works is a sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles, but he said that he had no plans to make any more works featuring the singer, who died on Thursday.

He said: “I’m saddened because Michael was a great artist. It’s a tragedy to see someone who’s so talented . . . not to exercise all the creativity that was within him.”

The same cannot be said of Koons.

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