Robilant+Voena is pleased to announce the opening of a new gallery space in New York, which will be inaugurated by an exhibition of paintings by Monegasque artist Philippe Pastor. The gallery, located on East 66th Street, is just moments from Central Park and offers the perfect setting for Pastor's bold and gestural abstract canvases.

This is Philippe Pastor's first solo exhibition of paintings in the United States, and coincides with Climate Week NYC (22 – 29 September), an initiative that aligns with the artist's underlying mission, using his art to inspire action for environmental causes. Showing across four rooms in R+V’s new gallery space, the journey through the exhibition will allow visitors to meditate upon the spectacular natural beauty of the world, while also considering the peril which the delicate balance of our planet now faces.

The exhibition will feature new paintings and examples from earlier series, introducing American audiences to the ambitious breadth of the artist’s oeuvre. Alongside the passionate Bleu monochrome works, evocative of surging oceans and glacial forms, the exhibition will include examples from the series Les quatre saisons, Avec le temps, Rose bonbon, and the largest piece in the exhibition, La fin du monde, measuring over three metres wide.

Dating from the last ten years, the paintings exemplify Pastor’s signature abstract and gestural technique that incorporates the four elements of water, earth, wind and fire. In creating the works, Pastor uses raw pigments sourced from the mountains of Morocco, which he applies instinctively and expressively. After this process, the artist often leaves the canvases outside, exposing them to rain, wind, and even naked flames. In this way, the artist shares the creative act with the environment in a process that incorporates elements of action painting and land art, resulting in paintings that embody a symbiotic collaboration between man and nature.

With the climate emergency as the driving force of Pastor’s practice, this exhibition offers an opportunity for visitors to New York during Climate Week to encounter artworks that are at once aesthetically captivating but also resonate with the theme of the events around the city, calling for immediate and widespread action to counteract our damaging impacts on the environment. Pastor’s paintings embody the power of art to inspire change; these meditative works, mesmerising in their infinite detail and gravity, convey a message that extends far beyond the walls of the gallery.

Together, these paintings evoke the beauty and precarity of the natural world, especially highlighting the vulnerability of the oceans and desert regions. Many of the paintings are characterised by fissures in their surface, like scars. These cracks in the Bleu monochrome works allude to melting sea ice, while the patterns in Rose bonbon paintings suggest the drought-ridden earth, cracking under the stress of oppressive conditions. The materiality of this latter series is particularly pertinent to the subject matter; the naturally-occurring pink-hued pigment that forms the basis of the Rose bonbon paintings is extremely rare due to its dependency on lower earth temperatures that have now been surpassed, meaning that no more of the pigment will be produced organically. Across the exhibition, many paintings draw attention to the increasing frequency of natural disasters and the subsequent devastation. Abstract compositions, comprising surging passages of blues, oranges and white, interlaced with cracks, suggest a fragility even in the most monumental paintings. Indeed, the large scale of many of the works create an almost immersive sensation for the viewer, encouraging both physical and visceral responses to the paintings that have a sense of the Sublime.