Afran: Welcome to Freedom

In a contemporary landscape where the questions triggered by the unconventional/unorthodox creative expression are overshadow by those mechanisms related to the inclusion in the establishment. Afran chooses to remain loyal to his freedom of thought: a true necessity to surpass limits and to move beyond predetermined enclosures in order to operate with his sensitivity and uniqueness. The elected material, the denim, is practically and symbolically congenial as a vehicle for the delivery of meanings that fully adhere to the poetic of an artist who lives immerged in the contradictions of our time. Afran cuts jeans to recreates forms and volumes, yet he always empathises on what can be considered as the backbone of the iconic garment: the seam. Seams are turned into graphic marks and supporting components of new formal structures. Jeans – a product, a fetish that has invaded both the collective imagination and the market. A signifier that, having gone through each and every meaning, fits all, glorifies freedom through standardization and becomes a universal second skin for all the traces of history. Synonymous of equality, it is the uniform of a world with no uniforms, the symbol of a society that feeds on contradictions without denying any. Afran, who is well aware of such a transversal reality of languages, decides to transcend all categories, to move beyond styles – already, the fabric in itself contains a strong expressive code that carries endless interpretations.
His work, at times, takes on the appearance of a score organised and structured in an almost minimalist way, as in the case of the collage of detached brand tags that recall a tab of integrated circuits, where names of people or concepts with an important role in the life of the artist are mixed.

In other works, as the research evolves, new creatures come to life to give voice to a world of subterranean and chthonic forces crying out the desire for redemption and freedom. Afran builds parallel worlds crossing the point where the vision frees all perceptive mechanisms of the time of the creation and can tune itself with the present.
His human jeanscape blends together hints of primordial instincts with elements that belong to the rhythms of the production; he masters the use of the jeans as a fragment owing a universal meaning that embeds sensuality and an extemporal space. It is a process that rules cultural, communication and information processes, builds interfaces and connects with the world. It is an architecture of contents whose understanding depends on the capacity to identify and read multiple codes. Here the body stand as a doorstep. It embeds and digests all the codes in transit. A language that wants to force humans to recognise, behind the seduction mechanisms of our time, a dimension of common belonging that is beyond the trends leading the masses and aimed at controlling individuals. The body scream its own desire of redemption; it is the theatre, where dramas hindering freedom are performed. It is not by chance that Afran uses belts. Belts have a two-pronged meaning: they support and yet they compress, they cicatrise and yet they hinder the free flow of energy. In the time of forced connection and media clangour, where the approach to reality is generated by compulsive behaviours, no freedom exists if there is no possibility of choice and true communication. A direct and unobstructed communication amongst creative individuals bearing a new vision of the world: Welcome to Freedom!

Stefania Carrozzini
Milan, January 29, 2016