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 surrounded by languages — Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Armenian, all the scripts of the city. He saw how writing could separate people or bring them together. So he made something that belongs to nobody and everybody at once. His letters draw from Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian, Gothic, Native American forms. But they're not any of those things. They're his. The building in the image — that's 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's 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.
