PARIS 2024. Mathieu Lehanneur, the magician designer of the Olympic torch and cauldron

Mathieu Lehanneur, designer de la torche et de la vasque olympiques. XinHua – Julien Mattia

"C'est rare de créer une chose qui va être vue par des milliards de personnes, c'est un objet rêvé pour un designer", confie Mathieu Lehanneur, créateur de la torche et de la vasque des Jeux Olympiques de Paris 2024.

The torch he designed is oblong in two perfectly symmetrical parts, in recycled steel whose color is similar to a mixture of gold, gold and silver. silver and bronze, a "dream", underlines the Frenchman whose project was selected from a dozen by the organizing committee of the Olympic Games.

"There is also a magical dimension in the Olympic torch, well beyond the design, it's the sacred fire", adds the designer, met by the ;#39;AFP at the "Factory", a former red brick industrial building from which he made his artistic crucible south of Paris.

"Dessiner la Torche des Jeux est un rêve de créateur. Symbole de cohésion et de partage, elle est la véritable clé d’entrée des Jeux.
Je l'ai voulue, simple comme un trait d’union et fluide comme une flamme."

Mathieu Lehanneur designer français pic.twitter.com/xYuJQ2jGzO

— Paris 2024 (@Paris2024) July 25, 2023

This sacred dimension interests him because it “summons visible and invisible things”, adds the man who also designed the heart of a Romanesque church in Poitou-Charentes in 2011.

Equality as a source of inspiration

With a height of 70 cm, weighing 1.6 kg, the torch, reproduced in 2,000 copies, will contain the flame throughout a relay which must lead it to across France from May from the Greek site of Olympia.

What the basin will look like – the "Grail" or the cup – which will be lit by the last of the 11,000 bearers on the day of the opening ceremony on July 26 in Paris, remains “confidential”.

"It won't be the same scale but if the torch constitutes the key to opening the Games, the basin is the door, they are made to be together", slips the designer, who could well "shed (one's) first Olympic tear at the moment of lighting in Paris".

Mathieu Lehanneur ANSA – DANIEL DAL ZENNARO

His inspiration was born from an idea that is dear to him: "equal treatment between the Olympic and Paralympic Games, between male and female athletes", he says, seated at a long table on which several prototypes are arranged, surrounded by samples of marble, glass and materials of all kinds.

"The challenge was to integrate all the elements" in this object with narrowed ends including "a burner system" complex which "does not go out whatever the climatic conditions", he explains. Matt in its upper part, the torch has shiny undulations in its lower part, "a symbolism of the Seine which runs through Paris", he specifies.

The simplicity of form as a common thread

Its common thread ? "The technology that we cannot see, the simplicity of the shape that a child could draw and the homage to nature".

"A rare intelligence, a sometimes stubborn perseverance and a global vision of things which leads him to explore unexplored areas", says his associate, the Brazilian businesswoman Isabela Renno Braga .

Since the creation of his first design studio in 2001 upon leaving the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Design Industriel in Paris, Mathieu Lehanneur has wanted to address “the brain and heart" people".

mathieu lehanneur unveils @Paris2024 torch as bat-like steel that mimics ripples of seine river https://t.co/PoUzosn9Ux pic.twitter.com/WMZudZ9Uw5

— designboom (@designboom) July 25, 2023

The MoMA in New York has acquired his after-school project on "drug design" and the Center Pompidou in Paris, several of his creations including the little brother of a plant-based air purifier, created in 2007 with Harvard University in United States.

Café du Louvre, installation at the Château de Chaumont, Air France lounge, sofas, chairs, mirrors, lamps…: these creations constantly play with "apparent oppositions" like when glass supports marble.

He created his own brand in 2018 and will set up a new base in New York in March. At the Maison & From January 18 to 22, which recognizes him as designer of the year, he will present his very latest project, “Outonomy”, a minimalist shelter containing “what we really need on a desert island: less to have and more to be.