Copyright © 2015. No duplication is permitted without permission from Bob Larson Tennis.

Marc Desgrandchamps has created the official poster of Roland Garros 2016. This French artist has chosen, through his figurative painting, to put in scene one of the more aesthetic techniques of tennis: the service.

By the legs appearing endless, Marc Desgrandchamps succeeds to sublimate the gesture of the service, revealed by a clever game of shadows.

“I created this poster based on photos of players over the past 60 years because it seems to me that tennis was perhaps more artistic. I found a tone and a color that interested me. It really has given the idea of restoring the attitude of the whole body in the shadow. It is she who focuses all the energy, while the legs are in the released position, relaxation,” explains Marc Desgrandchamps.

Thanks to the shadow of the service to the second plan, it also manages to give a certain depth to this work carried out on paper. The “shadow is one thing very present in my work. I am very attentive to the mobility of Shadows, in my paintings they have a kind of autonomy,” says the artist.

Born in 1960 in Sallanches, Haute-Savoie, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 1978 to 1981 then moved to Lyon, where he still lives now. The “Vincent Corpet, Marc Desgrandchamps, Pierre Moignard” exhibition, organised by Fabrice Hergott in the Centre Pompidou in 1987, sparked off a real controversy: at the time, the art scene in France was dominated by approaches that were considered more “contemporary” (installations, videos) and people had gone off painting, especially representational and narrative painting, the style preferred by Desgrandchamps.

Copyright © 2015. No duplication is permitted without permission from Bob Larson Tennis.