Philippe Pastor: North Pole and Other Precarious Landscapes
Robilant+Voena, via della Spiga 1, 20121, Milan
Former Club Plastic, via Gargano 15, 20139, Milan
December 2 – January 16, 2026
In North Pole and Other Precarious Landscapes, the Monegasque painter Philippe Pastor arrives in Milan with a body of work that might have seemed impossible in an earlier moment of abstraction: canvases that are both profoundly formal and explicitly bound to environmental urgency. The exhibition, spanning Robilant+Voena’s Via della Spiga gallery and a companion site in a former club on Via Gargano, registers an austere lyricism that, in its scale and materiality, insists on a physical encounter with planetary precarity.
The paintings test the boundary between internal pictorial tension and external ecological threat. The North Pole series, composed of large, often monumental mixed-media works, presents expanses of monochrome and near-monochrome fields where gestures’ trace and pigment’s sediment speak to forces larger than the artist’s hand. The works do not narrate environmental catastrophe so much as allow it to press in from the edges of the picture plane.
What distinguishes this body of work from earlier strains of abstraction is the deliberate inclusion of environmental consequence in the very logic of the paint surface. Pastor sources natural pigments, at times drawn from sites such as the Atlas Mountains, and exposes canvases to the elements during their formation, allowing wind, rain, sun, and earth to leave marks that are not accidental but integral to the pictorial structure. The surface becomes a record of interaction rather than a sealed aesthetic field.
The North Pole canvases oscillate between power and fragility. Broad sweeps of nearly uniform surface register subtle tensions—shifts in tonality, traces of abrasion and sediment—that seem to echo the fractured balance of polar ice itself. Abstraction here is not purely optical but becomes an index of instability: a vast white field suggests glacial expanse one moment, the next a fissured, collapsing terrain; a wash of grey can recall both winter’s hush and an atmosphere thickened by environmental stress.
Curator Caroline Corbetta situates Pastor’s work within an ongoing environmental commitment, noting that “each new series addresses a different environmental emergency,” a framing that clarifies the artist’s intent without sentimentalizing the work. In Milan, the exhibition’s two locations—an intimate gallery and an expansive industrial space—allow the viewer to experience both the concentrated materiality of individual canvases and the overwhelming conditions they invoke.
In North Pole, abstraction becomes a site where formal rigor and ecological urgency are not antagonistic but coextensive. The paintings do not illustrate a crisis; they embody a precarious balance, offering an encounter that is materially grounded, visually exacting, and unmistakably of the present moment.