Titouan Lamazou, from winner of the first Vendée Globe to “vagabond painter”

Orphans of any canvas, the hooks which 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 concrete floor confirms that the artist is in transit.

For three weeks, the traveling painter and former ocean racer, aged 69, supervised the hanging 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 wanderings from the Caribbean to the Marquesas, and grouped under the title “Under the stars”, to be discovered until March 2, 2025, i.e. the end of the 10^e Vendée Globe.

Crowned winner of the first edition of this quadrennial solo non-stop and unassisted round-the-world race nicknamed the “Everest of the seas”, on March 16, 1990, after 109 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes of navigation via the Capes of Bonne -Espérance (South Africa), Leeuwin (Australia) and Horn (Chile), Titouan Lamazou however no longer has much in common with the forty skippers – including six women – who will set off from the seaside resort, Sunday November 10 at 1:02 p.m., on their 18-meter monohulls (Imocas).

“Solo offshore racing was a parenthesis in my life as a wandering painter, victory obsessed me, but after winning the Vendée Globe, which remains to this day a pinnacle, the desire to arrive in front of the others m 'gave up, and I only followed the race from a very distant distance',sums up the man with his hair now white but still indomitable.

Antoine Lamazou (“the house”, in the Béarnais dialect of his ancestors) was not predestined to travel 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 the time.

Titouan, however, seriously struggled when he lined up at the start of the first Vendée Globe. At the age of 17, he left the Beaux-Arts de Marseille for “ discover the sea » by hitchhiking boat. In the Canaries and then in the Caribbean, he lived “ almost three years » by taking portraits on café terraces.

He is celebrating his 20th birthday in Saint Lucia, aboard Friday the 13ththe legendary three-masted nearly 40 m built for offshore racing in the early 1970s and recycled into a cruise ship for rich tourists by the navigators Jean-Yves Terlain, Loïck Peyron's uncle, and Yvon Fauconnier. “ They hired me as a handyman », remembers Lamazou.

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