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.
