Titouan Lamazou

Committed and atypical artist, Titouan Lamazou draws up a romantic inventory of the world, in paintings and photographs.

After a brief stint at the Beaux-Arts, he took off at the age of 18. It was thanks to his travels that he produced his first works in 1982. His meeting with Éric Tabarly led him to pursue a maritime journey until victory in the first Vendée Globe, in 1990. Throughout his years of navigation, Titouan continues to paint, draw and photograph. His journeys were soon the subject of numerous publications (Éditions Gallimard) and exhibitions (Musée des Arts décoratifs, Musée de l'Homme, Fondation Cartier, musée du quai Branly, etc.).

For seven years, from 2001 to 2007, Titouan traveled the five continents to meet women at the dawn of the 21st century. This tribute to beauty has evolved over the course of the travels into a plea denouncing the many faces of misogyny in this world. UNESCO has found the echo of its values in the humanist dimension and the cultural diversity which characterize this approach and as such has appointed Titouan UNESCO Artist for Peace. In 2012, he found Aïcha, a Tuareg friend and muse, in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso. He begins a four-year journey to the borders of Mali with Burkina Faso, Niger and Mauritania. The works resulting from this new journey are compiled in the book Retour à Tombouctou published in 2015 by Gallimard. Titouan is continuing in this field its collaboration with researchers in human and scientific sciences, an approach initiated during the Women of the World project. In 2019, in partnership with the IRD and the Museum of African, Oceanian and Amerindian Arts, the Center de la Vieille Charité in Marseille is hosting the exhibition Sahara, connected worlds , born from the meeting between the artist-traveler and the historian specializing in Saharan societies, Charles Grémont.

After the desert, Titouan returns to the ocean and the Pacific islands which had marked him so much during his first long-distance voyages. He multiplies the stays in the archipelagos of Polynesia, where he revisits his dream of Boat-Workshop. In 2018, the Quai Branly museum offered him carte blanche for an exhibition prefiguring the stopovers of this ship in the archipelagos of Polynesia. In 2020, Tahiti becomes its new home port. Titouan sets up his workshop there for a long time to better explore the five archipelagos of eastern Polynesia, with a view to an exhibition at the Museum of Tahiti and the Islands which will open in November 2021. While continuing his work as an itinerant artist, Titouan will fully dedicates to the accomplishment of its Boat Workshop project.