RETNA Indicates That He Strives for a Universal Visual Language

People ask RETNA all the time: what does it say? They look at his symbols and want a translation. But that's not how it works. The alphabet he built isn't a code to crack. It's a feeling to catch. He grew up in LA, a city shaped by many languages and scripts — Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Gothic, Chicano writing on the walls of his neighborhood. He saw how writing could separate people or bring them together. So he made something that belongs to nobody and everybody at once. The building in the image — that is a wall in LA, covered in his marks from top to bottom. Workers on scaffolding, the sun hitting the concrete, the whole structure transformed into a page. That is the universal language he is after. Not something everyone can read, but something everyone can feel. You don't need to know what it says to know it means something.

Official biography: Beyond the Streets — beyondthestreets.com/pages/retna. LA wall mural documented. Sources: beyondthestreets.com/pages/retna · wikipedia.org/wiki/Retna