Spirit Level

Something profoundly eerie remains, lingering in Afrassiabi’s paintings: At first, what you see seems quite real. Nothing is overtly spectral. Still, something inconspicuously uncanny resides in how things openly reveal their bare outlines and volumes, yet casually conceal what substance they may be made of. Fundamentally they leave you in doubt as to what, beyond their disarmingly simple appearance, the may actually be, and where their gathering is taking place: household objects assembled in physical space? Compositional components (circles, lines, geometrical bodies, textures and tones) arranged on the picture plane? Or emblematic ciphers — vessels of embodied meaning — organized within a symbolic microcosm? - Jan Verwoert