Johan Cruyff reimagined in the Renaissance as Louis Accard fuses sacred art with football | OneFootball

Louis Accard is recasting football in the language of 15th-century devotion, picturing Johan Cruyff as an Italian noble, pallid and robed in orange, with a ball rendered in gold leaf.

According to L'Équipe, the not yet 30 OL devotee, for whom Olympique Lyonnais is a family affair, wants to confront sacred materials with everyday subjects such as football. Childhood trips to Grenoble’s museum with his grandmother, plus shirts of Grégory Coupet and Juninho, shaped his eye.

A regular at Gerland and then Groupama Stadium, he studied drawing at Lyon’s Émile-Cohl. He trained in restoration and walked away from video games, audiovisual work and animation, deciding in 2023 to make art full time.

Four years earlier, St Bavo Cathedral in Ghent jolted him. Before the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, dated 1432, incense and the starkness of Christian imagery proved both troubling and magnetic.

His Freekick shows three wall-men with martyr-like faces in chequered shirts, a motif common in 14th-century sacred painting, balancing medieval stylisation with a realistic football action. Héraldique no4 Liverpool depicts a Reds supporter in a red cape strewn with liver birds in gold leaf, set beneath an arch typical of the Flemish Primitives.

Accard reads football’s rituals as secular religion, from collective trances to badges and mythic players. A photo of Zinédine Zidane guards his studio door and he likened Jean-Michel Aulas’s OL farewell to a Spanish-style procession. He admires Karim Benzema and Rayan Cherki for their improvisation and, despite lingering scepticism in parts of the art world, plans a 2027 show on solitude at work.

Source: L'Équipe

“Artificial intelligence was used to assist in creating this article based on reporting from the original source quoted.”