Philippe Pastor is a Monegasque painter and sculptor born in Monaco in 1961 and working between Monaco and Spain. His practice examines the relationship between human activity and the natural world through painting, mixed-media surfaces and sculptural installations. Pastor combines pigments with soil, minerals, plants and other raw materials, and sometimes exposes canvases to rain, wind or fire so that weathering becomes part of the finished work. This material process supports recurring subjects such as environmental damage, climate responsibility and the unstable boundary between creation and destruction. His Les Arbres Brûlés (The Burnt Trees) series transforms fire-damaged trunks into public sculptures that refer directly to wildfires and deforestation.
Pastor represented the Principality of Monaco at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2009 and was the official artist of the Monaco Pavilion at Expo Milano 2015. Recent presentations continue to connect abstraction with ecological observation. The North Pole ran at Robilant+Voena in Milan from 2 December 2025 to 27 February 2026, followed by Bleu Monochrome at TEFAF Maastricht from 14 to 19 March 2026. In his blue monochrome paintings, dense pigment, fissures and irregular surfaces evoke shifting terrains rather than fixed landscapes. Across painting and sculpture, Pastor uses physical transformation as both a working method and a way to consider how environments register pressure, damage and time.