Discover the poster for the 2022 tournament !

Every year since 1980, the FFT has invited an artist to design the official Roland-Garros tournament poster. For the 2022 tournament, that honour has gone to the 33-year-old French figurative artist Louise Sartor.

An iconic tournament poster

The second female French artist to design the Roland-Garros poster after Fabienne Verdier in 2018, Louise Sartor has produced a scene filled with light for the 2022 vintage, one in which a ball kid takes centre stage. 

Appearing in a Roland-Garros poster for the first time, the ball kids are key players at the Paris Grand Slam event and provide a spectacle in their own right. As discreet as they are essential, they play out a form of ballet on the clay courts.

In 2021, Sartor was invited to spend a day at Roland-Garros to savour the tournament’s unique ambiance for herself. She knew there and then what the subject of her poster project would be. Fascinated with the precision of the ball kids and their movements and captivated by their perfectly executed choreography, the young artist endeavoured to pay tribute to them and to showcase their efficiency, concentration, and skill.

The poster sees her use gouache to depict a ball kid kneeling by the net, ready to spring into action. Underscored by the shadow cast by the net, the brightness of the spring sunshine, which is such a feature of Roland-Garros, brings light to the scene. The poster emanates a warmth that is as familiar as it is comforting. Through the colours she chooses, the artist recreates the unique atmosphere of Paris’ Grand Slam tournament. 

The ball kids: the pride of Roland-Garros

The Roland-Garros ball kids have a very special role to play at the tournament and contribute to its high standing. Their expertise, which sets a standard for other tournaments to follow, is tried and tested. Every year, following a rigorous selection process and training, 250 youngsters aged 12 to 16 – all of them registered with the FFT and hailing from every region in France – have the privilege of treading the clay courts at the Porte d’Auteuil for the three weeks of the tournament. Their one and only objective is to achieve excellence.

Biography of Louise Sartor

A French artist born in Paris in 1988, Louise Sartor is a graduate of the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The subject of two noteworthy individual exhibitions in the French capital in 2017 and Los Angeles in 2018 and a participant at the Art Basel show in Hong Kong in 2019, she was also an artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici in 2019/20. 

In the meantime, she took part in a number of group exhibitions in France, such as Voyage d’Hiver at the Palace of Versailles in 2017, and overseas (in USA, Korea Republic, UK, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, among other countries). Her latest exhibition, at the Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris, opened on 29 January.

Since 2020, she has lived and worked in Treignac. Influenced by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, Sartor is a resolutely figurative painter who works in small formats and preferably on recyclable materials such as cardboard and recycled paper. She occasionally works on a tablet, stating that it is merely another sketchbook and that it provides a medium in any situation and a limitless palette of colours. In doing so, she reveals herself to be a truly millennial artist.

In her formative years, she drew a great deal, principally in black and white. Then, although she didn’t completely abandon drawing, she concentrated on painting and colours, using mainly watercolour techniques. Today she daringly mixes opaque watercolours on recycled paper. It is a material that she also uses in this poster, allowing it to dry slightly and then rubbing it to lend density and texture to the colours.