BOC Challenge

Titouan Lamazou: When I got back from my trip to Morocco, I tried once again to stay in my studio, this time in the Lot region. I was convinced that this isolation in the middle of the French countryside would be conducive, indispensable, for my work as an artist. (…) To get around the boredom of the immobility that I’d chosen, I set myself up an annex in the form of a truck-studio for driving on the roads around my countryside base. What became clear, though, was that I mainly painted on maritime and tropical themes...

Jean de Loisy: You’ve chosen, to illustrate this period, a series of paintings on cardboard composed of a juxtaposition of images: a child’s portrait, a female nude, isobars from part of a meteorological map over there, a bay fringed with coconut palms over here, and boats yet again...

TL: Yes, we see my daughter Zoé who had just been born, the portrait of her mother or her friends, trees because I’m a landsman in origin, juxtaposed with racing boats on which my friends Philippe Poupon and Yvon Fauconnier could be distinguished at the time... Ocean maps, distant horizons, silhouettes of imaginary islands and weather trends…

JdL: In fact these aren’t so much paintings but a program!

TL: You’re right. This period illustrates the paradoxes that you’ve noted in my personality particularly well: the sedentary nomad, the solitary man looking for others. By drawing Zoé and her mother Karin, I expressed my attachment to family, and at the same time, I dreamed of sailing round the world. 'When we love, we have to leave,' Blaise Cendrars once wrote. I hadn’t finished with the sea. One day, I called a journalist friend to ask if the solo round-the-world race, the BOC Challenge, that Philippe Jeantot had won two years earlier, was going to be restaged. He said yes. I put down my paintbrushes, and I went off in search of sponsors."

Extract from Œuvres vagabondes, 2016, Éditions Gallimard