Serve On SI

The French Open Unveils Official 2025 Roland-Garros Poster

The French Open unveiled the official 2025 Roland-Garros poster on social media.

Pat Benson

The official 2025 Roland-Garros poster, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu.
The official 2025 Roland-Garros poster, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. / @rolandgarros

Paris is a city known for its fashion, food, art, and sport. Every summer, the French Open offers the best that the City of Love has to offer. One of the many examples is its annual poster.

On Thursday, the French Open shared the official 2025 Roland-Garros poster. The 46th official Roland-Garros poster was created by the artist Marc-Antoine Mathieu.

The artist drew inspiration from comic book art while perfectly capturing the essence of the iconic clay court tournament. Mathieu is a graphic designer, illustrator and comic book author whose original creation aims to transpose the soul of Roland-Garros.

A press release explained that 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.

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 colors, 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 color 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."

Mathieu's main objective is to allow the audience to create their own story by inviting them to reconstruct the order of events in the ten panelse.

"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.

Mathieu concluded, "There's this obvious idea of a passage of time, which I signal by going from a sky-blue color 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."

This year's French Open runs from May 19 to June 8, 2025. Tennis fans can follow Sports Illustrated's Serve on SI for all the most important news from the sport.

More Tennis News

Published
Pat Benson
PAT BENSON

Pat Benson covers the sneaker industry for Sports Illustrated's FanNation. Previously, he has reported on the NBA, authored "Kobe Bryant's Sneaker History (1996-2020)," and interviewed some of the biggest names in the sports world. You can email him at 1989patbenson@gmail.com.

Home/News