NO ONE BUT ONE — NABIL ASSAF

I AM NABIL ASSAF’S POCKET KNIFE TO A PEN PAL.

Adilson De Oliveira

3 September 2026

I live in the handle of a Stanley knife, packed in with paper dust, glue and the usual debris of artistic conviction. I am cheap, replaceable and sharp enough to be useful, which already places me above most objects made for galleries. Nabil calls me his scalpel. I let him have the word. Men need language to make labour feel less temporary. His thumb rests near my neck, his index finger gives pressure, and together we spend nights cutting around strangers who have been dead long enough for nobody to remember their names.

Ear. Jaw. Collar. Eyelid. The nose is risky. Eyes are worse. One slip and a man who survived a civil war, a bad marriage, three government coup’s and perhaps prostate trouble loses half his face on a green cutting mat. There is something appropriately human about this. We endure decades of private misery only to be defeated by millimetres of potential imperfection.

Stencil work depends on damage conducted carefully enough to look intentional. Paper is removed so paint can pass through later. Thin bridges hold faces together. Too many and the image becomes heavy; too few and the whole damned thing collapses. After enough hours cutting, flesh stops looking like flesh. A sheet of paper becomes architecture. Islands. Gaps. Pressure points. Little structures desperately holding one another in place. I have often thought humans would understand themselves better if they spent more time making stencils.

The photographs arrive from flea markets in Beirut, Johannesburg, Madrid, Marseille, wherever the dead eventually become household clutter. They lie in boxes beside cracked watches, cutlery, postcards, medals from forgotten wars and porcelain dogs nobody loved enough to keep. Somebody once dressed carefully for these pictures. A man wore his best jacket. A woman fixed her hair. Children were threatened into sitting still. The photograph was taken seriously because photographs were expensive and death was still doing most of the editing.

Now somebody writes a price on the back. Nabil buys them. The name is almost, always, already gone. That is where No One But One begins: somewhere between affection and rubbish disposal. Nabil studies what remains. A fountain pen. A book. Spectacles. A watch chain. The ash-tray. The good suit. Human beings have always been wonderfully desperate to leave clues that they mattered. Portraiture made an industry of helping them along with their fascination with immortality. Wealthy men commissioned painters to surround them with books, columns, horses and architecture, as though death might be confused by ‘stuff’. Photography democratised the trick. For a modest fee, almost anybody could sit upright and manufacture evidence of significance.

Then significance begins to disappear. First, you are the whole picture, then you are Waldo swallowed by a Where’s Wally? crowd: technically still there, but increasingly dependent on somebody caring enough to look. Give it another generation and your photograph might end up beside that very picture book at a flea market, next to a broken radio, waiting for the future to put a price on all three.

Nabil scans the faces and works through their scratches, stains and anaemic greys. JPEG, Photoshop, printer. He cleans them just enough to survive what comes next, then sends them down from the soft, forgiving heavens of the digital world to the cutting mat, where I am waiting with my orange sleeves rolled up, scratches across my face, sharper than the idiot writing this essay, and suddenly as enthusiastic about cutting as a mob boss learning his new cellmate was an under-cover cop. Up there, mistakes have Command-Z. Down here, they have consequences. If the mouth goes, the mouth goes. If an eye drops out, it joins the little paper cemetery gathering beside Nabil’s elbow, another tiny casualty of the ancient human desire to make something last. I am his final edit.

The history of stencil is filled with practical people who had no time for immortality. Crates needed marking. Equipment needed numbers. Armies needed signs. Political movements needed slogans repeated quickly before someone arrived with a baton and tear gas. The stencil was useful because it could multiply. One cut, many marks. Cheap, fast, portable. A perfect technology for people who wanted to say something before the cunning changed their mind. Eventually art arrived and gave the whole thing a catalogue. This happens often. Human beings discover a practical method, use it for decades, then an institution puts white walls around it and begins discussing transgression over gin and tonic.

Nabil, however, uses that old grammar on faces. Beirut provides surfaces that have already suffered enough to understand him. Plaster splits. Paint peels. Bullet scars sit beside cables and air conditioners. Damp crawls across façades. Every wall contains previous decisions, most of them bad. He does not begin with an empty surface because Beirut rarely provides one. The city has already made the first mark. A woman’s cheek crosses a crack. A dancer loses part of his jacket to a hole in the masonry. Rain stains a forehead. The wall interferes with everything. This is probably healthier than canvas. Canvas lets the artist imagine he is in control. A ruined building reminds him that control was always a faux superstition.

I am Nabil Assaf’s small knife inside a much larger wound.

During Lebanon’s wars, families fled with what they could carry. Passports. Medicine. Money. Photo albums. Houses remained behind, full of beds, cupboards, dishes, all those solid objects human beings purchase because they have momentarily forgotten they are mammals fleeing catastrophe. The photograph could travel, and that is what mattered.

A photograph is absurdly fragile. Paper, chemicals, a fraction of a second. Yet people carried these things through checkpoints because memory becomes very heavy when everything else is burning. Then decades pass. The person who knew the name dies. The uncle becomes a man. The grandmother becomes a woman. The wedding becomes two strangers beside a cake. Eventually the photograph reaches a flea market and waits for Nabil. He once found his own aunt inside one of those piles. That must have been unpleasant in the particular way recognition can be unpleasant. He had spent years buying anonymous people and suddenly anonymity made a clerical error. There she was: Family.

The work had finally turned around and bit the hand that painted it. Recognition is an unstable business. A human life can remain legible for decades, then one person dies and the caption disappears. Soon an entire lineage becomes a box of attractive strangers.

I am Nabil Assaf’s thin edge between ancestry and landfill.

Lebanon has long been crowded with people explaining Lebanon. Ottoman administrators, French officials, missionaries, travellers, anthropologists, journalists, photographers, tourists. Everybody came armed with vocabulary. The country was modern, backward, exotic, cosmopolitan, sectarian, Mediterranean, Oriental, European, wounded, resilient. Human beings cannot tolerate a place without immediately turning it into an adjective.

The old studio photographs carry some of that history in their clothes and poses. French schooling, European dress, books, manners, tailored suits. Respectability always borrows costume. Colonial influence works particularly well when the coloniser eventually leaves and the mirror remains. Nabil stays near faces that could belong to his own family. Uncles, aunts, grandparents. Men with magnificent moustaches and expressions suggesting constipation or authority. He does not pretend they were good people. This is one of his better habits. Perhaps the gentleman was generous, or perhaps he was cruel. Perhaps he beat his children but god, did he tip well. Perhaps everybody loved him, or perhaps nobody did. Death does not improve character, but merely ends the complaints.

The anonymity gives the face room to exist without biography becoming propaganda. A human being returns to visibility without being promoted to saint. Sometimes Nabil places these portraits on buildings already waiting to die. A dancing couple appears across broken plaster. A woman smiles above weeds. An elegant man occupies a house divided among descendants living continents away.

The wall receives them with indifference. That is one of the street’s great virtues. Museums worry about preservation because museums are temples built around the denial of decomposition. Temperature is controlled. Humidity is monitored. Lights are lowered. Millions are spent slowing the obvious.

The street is less sentimental. Rain arrives. Sun fades pigment. Somebody tags across the face. A landlord paints over it. A developer demolishes the wall and installs apartments with tasteful concrete finishes designed to imitate decay. The dangerous wall becomes the interesting wall. The interesting wall becomes the desirable neighbourhood. Then comes coffee, design stores, rent increases and eventually a commissioned mural celebrating the displaced community. Rebellion is wonderfully nutritious. Capital can digest almost anything.

Stencil graffiti has travelled from political urgency to auction catalogue, from underpass to boutique hotel. Give any form of resistance enough time and someone will sell a tote bag. Nabil works inside this without pretending he has escaped it. He cuts, sprays, exhibits, returns to the wall. The contradiction stays. Contradictions tend to survive longer than manifestos.

There is an older ancestor beneath the whole operation. Tens of thousands of years ago somebody put a hand against a cave wall and blew pigment around it. Mouth, breath, hand, stone. The hand moved away and an image remained. We call this prehistoric art because humans enjoy placing respectable titles on evidence that frightened mammals once spat colour onto walls.

Nabil loves the lineage. I understand why.

The gesture is almost brutally pure. A body leaves evidence of itself by creating an absence around itself. The hand is gone. The shape remains. Eventually the person is gone too. The cave stays… for a while. Then the cave goes. There is always another layer of extinction if you are patient enough! Nabil’s anonymous portraits repeat the joke louder, ensuring the whole room can hear the punchline. Family album to flea market, scanner to computer, printer to cutting mat, my edge to aerosol, aerosol to wall. The dead man goes through more technology after death than he probably encountered while alive.

I am Nabil Assaf’s middleman.

I transfer one temporary thing into another temporary thing. There is dignity in knowing the terms. The project survives because it remains intimate. Beneath all the colonial history, urban theory, graffiti mythology and institutional wank, there is still a man sitting late at night studying another man’s grin.

He learns the curve of the jaw.

I cut it!

He notices how the hair meets the temple.

I follow!

The stranger becomes familiar in pieces.

There is something indecent about learning the geography of a dead man’s face while knowing fuck-all about the climate that wrinkled it. You know the cliff of his nose, the soft border of his jaw, the little peninsula of an ear, every contour mapped with the intimacy of a lover trapped in a gulag archipelago. The country itself is gone. Perhaps he loved jazz. Perhaps he hated his father. Perhaps he spent forty years secretly in love with somebody else’s wife. Perhaps he died peacefully after rolling off his own, Viagra still heroically holding the line as sleep arrived before death did, one last pharmaceutical erection raised against the great void. Or perhaps his final afternoon contained nothing so poetic: no God, no revelation, no tender inventory of children and regrets. Perhaps he died absolutely fucking furious because some prick had parked him in at the fruit and veg.

Late at night, the scraps accumulate. Cheeks. Collars. Backgrounds. Small pieces of eyes and mouths. Nabil brushes them aside and lifts the stencil toward the light. For a moment, the mutilation resolves: the face returns. This is the closest thing art gets to resurrection and it requires a great deal of culling.

Tomorrow the stranger goes up on a wall in Beirut, six meters tall and still anonymous. People will pass beneath him, photograph him, recognise Nabil’s hand and never know his name. Then rain, sun, dust, another tag, another demolition. I dull. I rust. Nabil snaps off my tip or throws me away. Nobody conserves Stanley blades. No registrar writes down my condition, no collector asks for provenance, no institution worries about my future. Another blade will slide into the handle and do exactly what I did. I envy that. Artists spend their lives trying to become irreplaceable. Tools are spared the indignity.

There is another photograph on the table tonight. Dark jacket, white shirt, pocket-watch chain, eyebrows suggesting intelligence or chronic indigestion. Nabil studies him. I slide from the handle. Click. The man is already dead. The wall will go eventually. Nabil will go. I will be in a bin by Thursday. Somewhere in that narrow interval, this stranger gets another appearance.

We begin at the ear. Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs comes to mind, though there is no dancing here, no radio, no audience. Just steel, paper and a steady hand taking the old man apart one clean section at a time. I have no philosophy beyond the edge. Nabil does enough of that for both of us.

‘No One But One’, is on view at CENTRÅL (based in Victoria Yards, Johannesburg) till the end of September 2026.