Trophée Jules Vernes

"Jean de Loisy: During this period, you kept a logbook of sketches with portraits of your crewmembers and your rivals, as well as your boats, but it was only during the last stage of the preparations for your big schooner that painting reemerged. Then literary references came back, namely to your fetish book The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. On the canvases a rhizome is represented, a big decorative form made up of curves and reverse curves, blending allusions to Guimarães Rosa’ sertão (backlands) universe with piracy, elements from your personal history, and also a few silhouettes of vahines that bring Gauguin to mind. The novel, your experience and your inclinations transformed into paintings of a fantasy world…

Titouan Lamazou: Fantasy perhaps, but to a certain extent, premonitory, for most of these works bore this handwritten legend: 'Let us make a hell of our own and try how long we can bear it.' A quotation from the famous pirate of the Caribbean, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, referred to by Daniel Defoe in his remarkable A General History of the Pyrates. What happened after the shipwreck of my schooner was a true legal hell that I wasn’t prepared for! Meanwhile, the references to The Devil to Pay in the Backlands once again combine my influences and real-life experience…"

Extract from Œuvres vagabondes, 2016, Éditions Gallimard