Each edition of the Olympic Games (OG) has its official poster. The same goes for the Paralympic Games: events of this importance cannot be envisaged without advertising and artistic support. In an inclusive approach, Paris 2024 has opted for a diptych, an assembly of two paintings which look at each other and complement each other. Here, a poster celebrating the XXXIII Summer Gamese Olympiad (July 26-August 11). There, a second poster announcing the event reserved for disabled athletes (August 28-September 8). Juxtaposed, the two images make up one. Never before have Olympism and Paralympism been associated in this way on an iconographic level.
Unveiled Monday March 4 at the Musée d’Orsay, this double creation is the work of French illustrator Ugo Gattoni, born in 1988. An art school graduate, the latter is a specialist in frescoes, hence a penchant affirmed, in his case, for accumulation and detail. Faithful to his style, his commission for Paris 2024 is teeming with characters, objects, buildings, in a setting of a stadium city and a world city at the same time, a sort of Paris entirely given over to sporting practice and located on the edge of the sea.
Observed overlooking from a diving board, on which the Olympic motto can be seen (Faster, Higher, Stronger – Generally), its utopian city is itself a feat (graphic): in total, 29 Olympic sports and 18 Paralympic disciplines are represented in the middle of a tangle of motifs and architectures supposed “show all the richness and diversity of our project”according to Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024.
The whole thing looks like a (dense) plan on which nothing has been forgotten: neither the emblematic monuments of the capital (the Grand Palais, the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, etc.), nor the symbols of the Olympism (the rings, the torch, the medal, the podiums, the torch relay, etc.), ancient Greece (the statue of Discobolus) and the Republic (Marianne).
In a nod to surrealism, the Eiffel Tower has been moved to the middle of the Stade de France, the Marseille marina (where the sailing events will take place) is sketched in the distance, as is the wave of Teahupo’o (the site of surfing, in Tahiti). In the sky, the French patrol flies in squadrons (note that aerobatics is not included in the Olympic program). At the top right, an island stands out… Great Britain, the cradle of Paralympism after the Second World War.
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