PAUL ROBAS
FRIEZE LONDON 2026
15 – 18 October, 2025
The Regent's Park, London
We are delighted to participate in Frieze London for the first time with a solo presentation by Vienna-based Romanian artist Paul Robas (b. 1989, Romania) in the Artist-to-Artist section of the fair, invited by Louise Giovanelli.
Central to Robas’ approach to painting is a fascination with the reproduced image and its translation from a digital format to a physical object. For this new body of work presented at Frieze, he draws on both made and found photographs from his archive, which he edits, processes and collages to construct new narratives. These images then become references for his paintings, passing through a sequence of mediums and transformations—captured by camera, manipulated digitally, then projected or transferred onto the canvas. This process creates an ongoing dialogue around how images travel and mutate across media, eventually appearing distorted, fragmented and imperfect. For Robas, the reproduced image therefore becomes a site for experimentation, where the artist’s manipulation and its own translation are integral to the formation of meaning.
The portrait is the dominant imagery across the works presented at Frieze, a deliberate choice that allows this process of transformation to remain at the forefront. Thus, his figures are deconstructed and anonymous, distorted and uncanny, and rendered in ways that resist clarity and challenge the expectation for images to be immediately legible. In a time increasingly preoccupied with clarity and image quality, Robas instead embraces ambiguity and imperfection, emphasising the fragility of what it means to be human versus the precision of digital tools. The faces that populate the paintings appear blurred, doubled, layered or partially obscured. Deep shadows, murky tonalities and indistinct contours suggest an interest in the ways we see and remember: perception is fleeting and incomplete, shaped and distorted by emotion and our surrounding circumstances. The figures appear less as attempts at outward likeness than as psychological or mental images on the verge of dissolving, highlighting how Robas uses the face not as a stable identifier of personhood, but as a surface through which memory, subjectivity and interior states are processed. To further his interest in the legibility of images and their elusive nature, he overlays objects and symbols over his subjects. These elements create mysterious associations, often relating to identity, power and fragility.
This investigation of the reproduced image extends into material terms through Robas’ use of encaustic, a technique he first encountered when studying the Fayum mummy portraits of the Roman period. He was fascinated by the way wax could be used as a medium for oil colours, as well as by the visual effects that could be achieved and the durability of the material. After experimenting with this technique himself, he discovered its ability to lend a ghostly appearance to his paintings, a result that emphasises the distilled and fading quality of the image he is interested in. Blending seamlessly with the other mediums in his practice—including oil, ink and acrylic—the encaustic works represent another way his research into the surface of painting and the cusp of an image’s breaking point coexist.
At the booth, paintings of identical scale are presented in succession, creating an almost cinematic effect reminiscent of photographic film, a movie reel or a storyboard. The sequence enhances a dynamic relationship between the works, with loose associations emerging from one painting to the next and opening up narrative possibilities. Like fragments of a larger, incomplete story, the paintings resist a singular reading, allowing memory, perception and imagination to connect them.