Studio la Linea Verticale presents for Miart 2026 Axis Mundi, a project that brings into dialogue the artistic research of Francesca Dondoglio and Valentina Palmi, two artists who, in the full emancipation of their own languages, address universal and spiritual themes without resorting to any rhetoric of gender. Their encounter generates a field of tension and listening, where painting and sculpture intertwine in the attempt to rediscover a center, a fixed point in a world that keeps turning. The title refers to the archaic image of the cosmic axis that connects heaven and earth, a symbol of balance and the foundation of the world. As Mircea Eliade writes, the discovery of the center is an original act: the rupture of undifferentiated space that allows the experience of the sacred. In Axis Mundi, this center is not a physical place, but a perceptive and inner condition, one that art restores as a space of revelation and presence. In a time marked by war, information overload, and disorientation, the project proposes a pause, a return to the essential: an island of active contemplation from which action itself may arise. In Francesca Dondoglio’s paintings, color becomes a threshold, a vibration that opens a passage between the visible and the invisible. Her practice, heir to Western aniconism and the tradition of the sublime, is born from a direct, physical contact with matter: a bodily gesture that transforms the pictorial surface into a space of crossing and meditation. In Valentina Palmi’s sculptures, clay, a primordial element, both fragile and resilient, stretches and ascends into pure forms, bipyramids and vertical rods that embody the desire for elevation. Matter becomes a sign of focus and breath, an equilibrium between earth and sky. In a decentralized and fragmented world, where even art risks being reduced to consumption, Axis Mundi reaffirms the possibility of orientation. The artwork is not an object but a cognitive experience; not ornament, but foundation of the real. Together, Dondoglio and Palmi trace a vertical line that unites gesture and contemplation, matter and spirit: an invitation to pause, breathe, and rediscover one’s own center of gravity.