We are proud to present a two-person booth featuring new works by Zurich-based, Italian artist Ilaria Vinci (b.1991) and Vienna-based, Romanian artist Paul Robas (b.1989), exhibited in dialogue for the first time. The duo presentation responds to the fair’s overarching curatorial theme, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which invites participants to navigate the complexities of the present and spark collective reflection on our shared responsibility aboard Planet Earth. Both artists approach this prompt by exploring the unstable terrains of memory, myth, intuition and transformation – each using their distinct visual languages to blur boundaries between the real and the imagined.

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Ilaria Vinci presents a new series of sculptures reproducing birthday cakes, each topped with a single, unlit candle. In this new body of work, Vinci uses the familiar form of the birthday cake to question human-centred perceptions of time and existence. Each sculptural cake features a date which marks the estimated age of a celestial body or natural element – a star, a volcano, a tree – shifting the celebratory gesture away from an individual scale towards a broader, ecological one. Inspired by Emanuele Coccia’s Metamorfosi, Vinci invites us to celebrate life as a generative force and to distance ourselves from a culture obsessed with endings, to embrace one that values the ongoing birth of things. Both playful and profound, the works encourage a longer, planetary perspective on our presence and impact on the universe. Alongside this new body of work, the presentation features new sculptures from her ongoing “Key” series, where Vinci takes idiomatic expressions – “Key to Immortality,” “Key to Your Heart,” “Key of Success”– and translates them into real, three-dimensional objects that straddle the line between symbolic tool and surreal artefact.

Paul Robas presents a suite of new atmospheric paintings that drift between the intimate and the elusive. His figures emerge from dreamlike environments, where characters are caught in moments of introspection or gentle exchange, always on the edge of becoming or vanishing. These works dwell in memory’s unstable zones – where perception fragments and reassembles itself through time, desire, and loss. Visual motifs such as lens flares and cropped compositions evoke a mediated experience of seeing, reminding us that perception is a process shaped as much by context as by vision. In Robas’ work, painting becomes a metaphor for the mind’s own rearrangement of images and feelings, constantly restructured, never fixed.

Though differing in their subjects and preferred medium, Vinci and Robas find resonance in their shared interest in the ephemeral and the transformative. Where Vinci leans into the synthetic, pop-cultural, and speculative, Robas answers with softness, introspection, and a reverence for the perceptual thresholds of the painted image. Together, their works extend an invitation to step beyond the immediate – to consider not just what we see, but how we dream, remember, and imagine otherwise.