2025 poster celebrates comic book art!

The unusual marriage of tennis and comic books

The inspiration for his creation came after the chosen artist had observed a tennis court from above – a unique perspective that immediately transported him to his own area of expertise: comic books. "From the moment I realized that a tennis court seen in plan (with its tramlines and service boxes) resembles a comic strip, I had fun transforming the layout of a tennis court and marrying it with the grid pattern of a comic," said the Beaux-Arts d'Angers graduate. "It has exactly 10 panels of different shapes, which can form a comic book page. Then it was just a matter of finding the story," he added.

An illustrator first and foremost, Marc-Antoine Mathieu has published some twenty comic books exploring diverse narratives from book-objects to more classic stories, while also creating the scripts for these. In creating the Roland Garros poster, a piece of art that becomes emblematic of the tournament edition it represents, Marc-Antoine began with just his notebook and pencil. He started by jotting random ideas, before turning them into sketches. "Once we have the image, we use Chinese ink with a pen or brush, and then we digitize it. The post-production phase on the computer allows me to fine-tune it and refine the colours, because I'm not a painter," he explained.

Thanks to a hybrid production method that meshed his talent with a little digital assistance, he managed to recreate the colour of clay as faithfully as possible. "Clay is more than a shade," said the artist who won the Best Album award for Le Dessin at the Sierre festival in 2002. "It’s a pigment and not easy to render on an image. This phase also involved very constructive feedback from the French Tennis Federation, who facilitated a fascinating dialogue with people who know tennis much better than I do."

A poster with multiple interpretations

Allowing the audience to create their own story by inviting them to reconstruct the order of events in the ten panels is Marc-Antoine Mathieu's first wish. "Normally, a poster must be perceived and understood immediately to have a degree of effectiveness. Here, I wanted it to contain a story that was completely open to the interpretation of the viewer. It questions the gaze," he continued.

The artist nevertheless hints at the temporality of the sequence, with the presence of the sun, moon and stars suggesting the depicted action begins late morning and ends during the evening sessions. "There’s this obvious idea of a passage of time, which I signal by  going from a sky-blue colour to a nighttime blue. The court has fallen asleep, maybe the match continues, we don't really know... What happens at Roland-Garros at night when everyone has left? We can have many hypotheses, and that's what I find interesting in an image."

Fans of the poster can now recreate their own match and their own afternoon at Roland-Garros. Let your imagination run wild!