Mur­mure is a duo of French artists com­posed of Paul Ressen­court (born in 1981) and Simon Roché (born in 1983). They met. In 2010 dur­ing their stud­ies at the « Ecole Supérieure d’Arts & Médi­as » de Caen, dis­cov­er­ing a com­mon pas­sion for draw­ing and street art, bey­ond their aca­dem­ic career. Their act­ive artist­ic prac­tice, which ingeni­ously trans­forms a chosen loc­a­tion into a poin­ted pictori­al nar­rat­ive, is insep­ar­able from metic­u­lous stu­dio work. After demon­strat­ing their mas­tery of char­coal draw­ing and screen print­ing tech­niques, they have added paint­ing on can­vas and the edi­tion of bronze sculp­tures to their prac­tice since 2021.
Delib­er­ately com­mit­ted, the Mur­mure duo explores strong themes in a play­ful, dream­like or poet­ic way, in order to share their vis­ion of the world. Child­hood, the home­less, the con­sumer soci­ety, new tech­no­lo­gies, or even the envir­on­ment and man’s impact on the plan­et, are their favor­ite sub­jects, which they for­mu­late dif­fer­ently depend­ing on the medi­um used : they pictori­ally echo the con­cerns of their gen­er­a­tion. Inspired by Banksy, Pejac, Leval­et and Ern­est Pig­non-Ern­est, Mur­mure offers a strik­ing icon­o­graphy due to the rel­ev­ance of its sub­ject, which chal­lenges the view­er and invites them to inter­act with the exist­ing struc­tur­al ele­ments. If each of Mur­mure’s works car­ries a mes­sage, it remains no less subtle, leav­ing the view­er free to inter­pret each image accord­ing to their sens­it­iv­ity.

Each of their pro­jects in an urb­an con­text is born before patient pro­duc­tion in their stu­dio. Work­ing with four hands, Paul and Simon most often draw with black chalk. Its soft­nesse allows them to obtain intense depth in blacks, and a par­tic­u­larly real­ist­ic ren­der­ing. Each work is the res­ult of a pro­cess of shared reflec­tion on the com­pos­i­tion, mean­ing and its sin­gu­lar­ity. It is first in the stu­dio that a pro­ject will be stud­ied and developed (or dis­carded), before it can see the light of day in the street through the cre­ation and repro­duc­tion of a draw­ing on scale 1. The pro­ject will often give rise in par­al­lel to a vari­ation of works inten­ded to be exhib­ited in a last­ing format favor­ing acquis­i­tion, as opposed to their urb­an col­lages of an eph­em­er­al nature.

Original Drawing: Created in 2025 for ArtOnPaper in New York, presented by Mazel Galerie.