The artist
Olivier Maynard
Photographer and visual artist
Olivier Maynard lives and works in Sète, an almost-island town held between the sea and the lagoon. He has been photographing for more than thirty years and shaping ships since childhood. For a long time these two gestures lived apart. Today they carry the same name.
Olivier Maynard in his workshop
The work
Two materials, one gaze
For three decades he put his eye at the service of other people's talent. Advertising, industry, publishing, the tables of great chefs. Commissioned work, where you learn to look quickly and accurately, and where you step back behind what you show.
Two years ago he took the step he had been putting off: making the image a work rather than a service. The photographs that once magnified the work of others now exist for themselves.
Beside them, the ships. Hulls eaten by salt and rust, shaped piece by piece, which the Musée de la Mer in Sète brought together this year for a solo show. Paper and feigned metal, two materials carried by a single gaze: that of someone searching for what time leaves on things.
The workshop
The hand, detail by detail
Cranes, hatch covers, containers, rigging: every element is shaped and weathered individually, as close to the real thing as possible. Templates are drawn by hand, parts cut one by one, then aged.
The path
From the green of the Cantal to the blue of Sète
« In the 1970s the port of Sète is very busy and, above all, freely accessible. My favourite walks with my father consist of watching the unloading of cargo. At five years old I already admire the gigantic freighters from Panama, Istanbul or Nassau; those distant lands mean adventure. »
Born in the green of the Cantal, he grew up beside a port still open to all. At eleven he climbed aboard a cargo ship for the first time, where the captain offered him his first soda. He sometimes sailed on deep-sea tugs, and kept in mind the manoeuvres, the taut ropes, the vibration of those steel monsters.
He built his first boats from the packing cardboard of the family pharmacy. At thirteen, at the Musée de la Marine in Paris, he discovered the vessels Louis XIV had sailed on the basins of Versailles. What struck him was not the feat, it was the patina: three hundred years settled on wood. Back in Sète he built a large sailing ship, its sails sewn by his mother from old linen sheets steeped in tea, its deck aged with hydrogen peroxide. Reproducing the wear of time became an obsession that has never left him.
The path to the image, on the other hand, was anything but obvious. He began medical studies oriented towards pharmacology, interrupted by military service. There, at dawn, he prepared the weather charts for the pilots of the Patrouille de France, and used his free time to enrol at the Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, in the sculpture department, under François Michaud. He learned volume there, and light, and composition. Architecture fascinates him, Oscar Niemeyer above all, as do Vasarely and the drawing of the great coachbuilders of the 1970s.
Photography arrived by chance. In the family attic he came across the raffia hats his mother wore in the 1950s, improvised a session with his father's old Foca, and never put the camera down again. A black and white portfolio, an assistantship with the photographer Pierre Soissons, the ETPA in Toulouse, the diploma in 1992. Two years later he settled in Sète as an advertising photographer.
Thirty years in the service of others followed. His work with great chefs, the Pourcel brothers among them, and his presence at starred dinners took him from Raffles in Singapore to the Dusit Thani in Bangkok. Shanghai, Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo: Asia fed his eye lastingly, and his taste for saturated colour and for materials.
His workshop is now in Sète, land of Paul Valéry and Georges Brassens, and a source of inspiration for Pierre Soulages, Hervé Di Rosa, Robert Combas and Noto as well. From the green of the Cantal he has moved to the deep blue of the lagoon. And the images that served the talent of others take their place at last, under his own name, in the galleries.