Retro graffitism

Born in 1974 in Paris
Lives and works in St Malo since 2020.

Emerging from the 1990s graffiti scene, TOONS gradually abandoned the street for the studio before returning in the early 2010s under the name RETRO GRAFFITISM. A new name for a new approach, fueled by multiple influences through which it now appeals to a wider audience.

Self-taught and a jack-of-all-trades, RETRO plays with codes, styles, and traditions to produce narrative works. Comics, mythology, classical literature, artistic movements, architecture, typography, underground culture... RETRO mixes different universes, often distant in space and time, which collide according to his imagination.

Through a work of destructuring, restructuring, sampling and visual sampling, RETRO moves from drawing to installation, painting or sculpture, and offers graphic objects with a single objective: to tell universal stories that everyone can appropriate according to their own sensitivity.

Text by Nicolas Gzeley