SOS “Sequence of Sentences”
Thursday, February 20 — Sunday, February 23, 2025
Gravitas Club, 435 N Camden Dr, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Reception and Performance: Saturday, February 22, 2025, 07:00 PM — 10:00 PM
Los Angeles, CA — There is a temptation, when speaking of RETNA, to assign meaning. To sift through the inscriptions, parse the glyphs, decode. But what if the meaning is not in translation? What if it is, instead, in the refusal? In the insistence that language—especially a language of this nature: hybrid, illegible, ancient and immediate—is as much a vehicle for concealment as it is for revelation?
RETNA has not had an exhibition in some time. That, in itself, is an event. What does it mean for a figure so deeply embedded in the city’s surfaces—on billboards, on walls, on the bodies of those who move through its corridors—to return in this way, in a formal presentation at the Gravitas Club? There is always an irony in institutionalizing the artist who made his name in the margins, but irony has never been a deterrent, least of all in Los Angeles.
The works in SOS (Sequence of Sentences), his latest collection, center on Los Angeles—a fraught subject, if only because it is so familiar. RETNA’s Los Angeles is neither an idyll nor a simple critique. It is a place of glamour and dispossession, of movement, of layered histories. There are references to Malibu, Mexico, the Spanish music that threads through the city, and to the dead, whose presence lingers.
There are new works alongside others that reconstruct pieces long gestating in this studio, works never before seen, now expropriated through auction. There are familiar gestures, returns to a visual language that is, by now, unmistakably his own. Text-based abstraction, not as a stylistic exercise, but as an ongoing inquiry into what it means to write in a way that resists easy comprehension. And then, of course, there is the response. Because this exhibition is, inevitably, a response to the recent displacement from his studio, to the auctioning of work by a landlord with no claim to its meaning, work that was not meant to be seen on an auction site in that way, under those conditions. But response, here, does not take the form of protest. RETNA does not explain. He offers no clarifications. Instead, there is the work itself: layered, inscrutable, refusing extraction, insistent on its own terms.
Los Angeles, the city that raised him, has always shimmered with a kind of promise that is also a threat: development, appropriation, legal battles over what belongs to whom. The title itself plays with the mechanics of language and adornment: sequence as sequins, sentences as legal documents, surface as spectacle, the dazzling and the contested. Through layered text, fragmented narratives, and a materiality that refuses to settle, SOS traces what has been lost and what remains. Each work speaks to a city in flux, where identity, authorship, and belonging are as unstable as the glittering facades that line its boulevards.
The works in SOS, a cry for help, are caught in the aftermath of a legal battle stemming from the physical seizure and auctioning of his studio’s contents as well as the communities and histories that have long shaped his work. Here, nothing is static; nothing is wholly possessed, but everything—like the city itself—insists on being seen. There’s an irony in a landlord profiting from an artist’s work in a city that has spent decades displacing the very people who make it vital. RETNA’s experience is not isolated; it is another iteration of Los Angeles’ long history of gentrification, real estate speculation, and the erasure of artist spaces.
RETNA reflects, “The colors are working with the materials that I have been left with due to the loss of my studio with all my belongings. I have been forced to go back into my memory bank and try to re-create key moments that I can share.”
A city is a palimpsest. It is written and rewritten again and again. RETNA knows this better than most. The works in this collection resist the notion of fixed meaning, offering instead another inscription on a surface that remains in perpetual flux. Each mark, each gesture, is part of a narrative that refuses to settle, constantly shifting and evolving like the city itself. In this way, the works in SOS mirror the city’s condition: always changing, always in the act of being reimagined.
About RETNA
Los Angeles-based artist RETNA accesses spaces between text-based imagery and abstract emotive states with his mysterious lines of verse. Each block of text is a sophisticated system of hieroglyphs, calligraphy, and illuminated script. With influences from Arabic, Egyptian, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon (or Old English), and Native American typographies, RETNA’s distinctive language communicates a personal form of poetry. RETNA’s messages are masked in ciphers: words and meanings that are never immediately revealed nor capable of being accurately translated. He employs ancient totemic symbologies as a baseline, overlaid with beats from the urban jungle (sourced from his background in Los Angeles, born from Pipil—western indigenous El Salvadorian—Cherokee, Spaniard, and African-American bloodlines. These diverse subcultures are channeled into his work, often accompanied (either in the studio or on the street) by a stream of ambient or musical sounds. It is this multi-sensory experience that is brushed onto the surface for RETNA: a synthesis of auditory and visual content spontaneously manifested.
RETNA (Marquis Duriel Lewis) was born in 1979 in Los Angeles. At the age of fifteen, he began painting on posted fashion advertisements and, from there, led one of the largest and most innovative graffiti art collectives in the city. In addition to exhibiting at institutions and galleries in Los Angeles (including the façade of The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Grand Avenue location for their 2013 Gala celebrating the blockbuster exhibition Art In The Streets), Miami, London, New York (including the prestigious public exhibition space of the Houston-Bowery Wall), and Hong Kong, RETNA has created exclusive collaborations with brands such as VistaJet, Nike, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel. RETNA lives and works in Los Angeles.
