In 1971 Shakir Hassan Al Said founded al-bu'd al-wahid — the One Dimension Group — and pulled the Arabic letter out of calligraphy into abstraction. He gave up the easel for what he called the rugged aesthetic of the urban wall: mud-brick and concrete worked over with repetitive gestures and lacerations, single letters scratched in like graffiti.

This system treats the interface the same way. The page is a mid-dark earthen wall, stained and scored. Ochre and oxide arrive as streaks, chalk-white only as a scratch. A large inert field carries one small incised event, off-centre — the surface does as much of the talking as the mark.