A hymn to life and our planet - Meeting with the artist and navigator Jean-Noël Duchemin

Jean-Noël Duchemin is a French artist with a unique and vibrant universe, who created the magnificent illustrations for ourMath'moi ça game. He is passionate about sailing and the marine world, which influence his art. Also, during this European Sustainable Development Week , it is natural to talk with him and gather his point of view as an artist, lover of the sea and sensitive to ecology.

What is your relationship with the marine world, as an artist?

These two worlds interpenetrate completely. Everything I experience on the water, underwater, during my sailing trips, can be found in my artistic work. And it is my creations that allow me to set sail again. It is a kind of continuous loop that nourishes me in every sense of the word. That is why I like to quote Robert Filliou's phrase: "art is what makes life more interesting than art."

For those who are discovering you, how is the world of the sea expressed concretely in your work?

At first glance, fish are omnipresent (in almost the majority of my works, by the way). My work remains figurative, but it is free figuration. I do not try to represent reality. It is more of a dreamlike, colorful world, which revolves around these marine atmospheres. Afterwards there are sometimes terrestrial digressions but I often come back to this main subject of the sea.

You have always been very sensitive to respect for the planet and ecology. Since adolescence it was an important subject for you.

Indeed, it has always been there. I remember that at the time I read La gueule ouverte which was an environmentalist newspaper. Everything was already written. Unfortunately, we are 40-50 years later and we are paying the consequences. They wrote that all agricultural and human activities were going to lead us straight into the wall and that we had to change our ways of operating, that we really had to pull ourselves together (to also allow a better sharing of the planet's resources), not to continue to consume and pollute excessively... We can see it clearly here. We live in a wonderful and rather protected region which is Cap Sizun. But it remains, just like Brittany in general, a place of high agricultural activity, with high nitrate pollution and exponential discharges, which still continues despite warnings and various decisions. And yet, we observe that farms are expanding year after year and are always moving towards more intensive farming.

In your work, you also have an ecological approach, to the extent that you recycle certain materials.

In everything I use, I try as much as possible to work with recycled materials. The most emblematic in my work are the elements of carbon composite racing boats, which otherwise are not recycled. I use them as supports for works and I find that it is an extremely attractive material. I allow them to have a second life and prevent them from being fragmented into small pieces and buried in a dump.

How do you use your art to raise awareness about respect for biodiversity and the planet?

I think that in my pictorial approach, there is already the strong presence of tonic colors, which pay homage to life perpetually. It is my way of sublimating what I consider beautiful and pleasant to live, of going in a direction that would be the reverse of harmful fumes, grayness and fear... I try to raise awareness, through this hymn to life, of the importance of preserving it. In any case, it is my form of commitment and sharing on the subject.

We are in the middle of European Sustainable Development Week. What ecological actions have you found particularly effective in recent years?

Overall, I quite appreciate Greenpeace's actions. Their mode of operation is totally free from any subsidies from the State or private structures and this gives them a great deal of independence. They are quite relevant in their mode of action which is militant. I do not have the soul of an activist but I still look with admiration at this type of behavior, which is not always easy to endorse.

But it's not just them, there are also all the individual actions that people who have a destiny as engineers or others, in an industrial structure, can take and who drop everything to start market gardening or live in harmony with nature. It's a return to something simpler. These are really complicated life choices to make but which are essential.

There is also an association called Bloom that warns about fishing methods that are destroying the planet. Recently in Europe, in the English Channel, there was a desire to electrify fish underwater to catch them. The association managed to prevent this from becoming the fishing method used by everyone through its action and it seems to have been stopped.

You live on the Breton coast and you are often at sea. Have you seen the oceans change over the years?

Yes, I felt it strongly during every trip. Once, I ferried a boat from the Antilles to the Mediterranean Sea. I had sailed for a day in a completely calm. The water was completely smooth and we could see through it quite far below sea level. At first I thought I was sailing on a school of jellyfish and in fact it was hundreds of thousands of plastic bags that, from the surface to the farthest I could see, were drifting. It was a truly frightening sight. Today, it is estimated that at least half of our plastic production goes into the oceans… It is becoming a health issue for animals and even for humans since we find plastic nanoparticles in our food.

How is the marine universe present in the game Math'moi ça , which you illustrated?

To begin with, it is a variation of my Z fish that ended up with legs and two eyes, which could also make one think of flatfish that live on seafronts or sea turtles.

And concerning the numbers that I represented on the game cards… I am always impressed by everything that is linked to popular art. In Brittany, not far from where I live, there is an emblematic fishing town called Douarnenez. There were many boats that fished for sardines in this bay. They all had a registration number written on their side, sometimes engraved and painted, or sometimes simply painted. It was a number that was found everywhere on the everyday objects of sailors. These numbers are called moustache numbers. Depending on the port, they changed their graphics a little. For the game Math'moi ça , I paid homage to this popular mode of expression, whose graphics have always appealed to me. The fishermen even said that there were certain numbers that were fishy and others not. So sometimes, they fought to have a special number on their boat.

To find our Math'moi ça mathematical game, it's here