The French Open Poster 2024, Art by Paul Rousteau

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When I think of the French Open, I never think of my favorite French things: Debussy’s La Mer and Monet’s Waterlilies. Ripples of sound, brushstrokes of light. I think, instead, of my favorite things: The art of the feathery drop shot, the heavy topspin forehand. The art of grunt and groan and sweat.

All this changed when I saw Paul Rousteau’s innovative poster for the 2024 French Open, which insistingly reminds us that the French Open is about Paris, too, its art and culture. Rousteau “wanted to show tennis invading Paris,” so he experimented with placing a tennis clay court in different places in Paris with the help of AI. He knew he might have something special when a tennis clay court was placed on the Seine.

Inspired by the French movements of impressionism and pointillism, Rousteau then painted dots of color next to each other to create a luminous surface, a play of color and light dancing on the Seine under a tennis ball sun in a sunflower van Gogh sky. My new plan for attending the French Open’s changed. More time walking the Paris streets. More time contemplating its art.

Artist Bio (from his website): Born in France in 1985, Paul Rousteau explores the limits of photography and our perceptions. His art, made of optical illusions, navigates between digital art and pictorial materials. At the borders of abstraction and sacred art, his images in joyful colors reveal the deep quest of the artist ​“to sublimate the visible and show the invisible”. From portrait to landscape, his hallucinatory and contemplative visuals are requested by the biggest magazines, brands and museums.

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