Orphaned from any canvas, the hooks that dot the walls of Titouan Lamazou’s Parisian workshop, on the banks of the Seine, indicate the end of a cycle of creation. And the travel bag lying on the bare cement floor confirms that the artist is in transit.
For three weeks, the 69-year-old traveling painter and former ocean sailor supervised the placement of his most recent paintings at the museum of modern and contemporary art in Sables-d’Olonne (Vendée). A multitude of magical skies captured over two years of pilgrimages from the Caribbean to the Marquesas, and grouped under the title “Under the Stars”, will be discovered until March 2, 2025, that is, the end of the 10th century.my Vendée Globe.
Crowned winner of the first edition of this quadrennial solo, non-stop and unassisted round-the-world trip, nicknamed the “Everest of the seas,” on March 16, 1990, after 109 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes of sailing through the Capes. from Bonne-Espérance (South Africa), Leeuwin (Australia) and Horn (Chile), Titouan Lamazou no longer has much in common with the forty skippers – including six women – who will leave the seaside resort on Sunday, November 10 at 1 p.m. :02 hours, in their 18 meter long monohulls (Imocas).
“The solo offshore races were a parenthesis in my life as a wandering painter, the victory obsessed me, but after winning the Vendée Globe, which remains to this day a pinnacle, the desire to arrive ahead of the others abandoned me and only continued the race from a very far distance’, summarizes the now white-haired but still indomitable man.
Antoine Lamazou (“the house”, in the Béarnaise dialect of his ancestors) was not predestined to travel across the oceans. “ From the age of 11 I decided to become an artist. », explains the man who was born in Casablanca, in Morocco, where his father, a central engineer, worked at that time.
Titouan, however, had serious problems when he lined up at the start of the first Vendée Globe. At the age of 17 he left the Fine Arts of Marseille to “ discover the sea » hitchhiking on a boat. “He lived in the Canary Islands and then in the Caribbean” almost three years » taking portraits on cafe terraces.
Celebrates his 20th birthday in Saint Lucia, on board friday the 13ththe legendary three-mast almost 40 m built for offshore racing in the early 1970s and recycled into a cruise ship for wealthy tourists by sailors Jean-Yves Terlain, uncle of Loïck Peyron, and Yvon Fauconnier. “ They hired me as a handyman », recalls Lamazou.
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