Under the stars

Paradise exists. Tenuous, fragile, unique in the universe, until proven otherwise. This phenomenon was born from the confrontation of the energy of a star, the Sun, with the telluric forces of our planet. Some scientists call it the Critical Zone. It was while living in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific that I recently became aware of the extreme thinness and great vulnerability of this tiny habitable space on the surface of the Earth that has been hosting the evolution of the living things to which we belong for billions of years and to which we promise imminent extinction. I had never before looked at our reality from this angle.  I thought of the ocean as a gigantic abyssal skylight and not a puddle! I embraced the atmosphere as an infinite space close to the stars and not reduced to a few short kilometers. Inspired by this wonderful explosion of terrestrial and marine biodiversity, my paintings are so many visions. All the works presented here form a tribute to the earthly paradise.

Titouan Lamazou, Tahiti 2024 

By de-centering and decentrating, individualizing, naming and complexifying, art can contribute to promoting a broad ecological awareness. "Because ecological thinking is so new, so open, and therefore so difficult, it seems obvious that art can show us part of the way,"2 Morton reminds us. Striking minds and illustrating invisible phenomena are some of the possible magics of painting. Titouan Lamazou uses all the force of his art to account for the fragile miracle that is the living "under the stars".

Laetitia Chauvin, Art Critic- 2024

Titouan Lamazou leads us to rethink our relationship to the world, to the living and the non-living, in a less divided and more integrated way, since we are a stakeholder in what we call nature by distinguishing ourselves from it, by extricating ourselves from it. Titouan helps us to decenter our gaze and to reinvent the very project of governing nature by humans by recreating the link of reciprocity that is still found today in certain modes of management of ecosystems and natural "resources" in French Polynesia such as the rāhui, this historical model of natural resource management with a system of spatial and temporal prohibitions that allows sustainable management and is brought back to taste in the context of global change. These fallows of the sea to the rescue of the lagoons constitute a successful example of the implementation of territorial governance and management through the concept of socio-ecosystems based on the construction and respect of the commons, to which Titouan Lamazou's work at the interfaces contributes.

Camille Mazé, CNRS Research Director, Sciences Po-CEVIPOV - 2024