Lucien Murat is a French artist born in 1986. It feels paradoxical that cyberspace, which was first "colonized" by rebellious nerds, hippies, punks, and other underdog cultures, went from a hypothetical hideout filled with bizarre to a mainstream hotspot of unnaturally perfected allure. This all happened while our actual reality was set ablaze under the deafening sound of the clinking metal machinery. And having Warhammer, Philippe Druillet's comics, and Doom in the early days of the Internet as formative experiences, Lucien Murat keeps going back to this unfortunate scenario, looking for a way to convey it in a painting-like format.
When back in 2010 Murat started patching up and painting on old tapestries found in every grandmother's house in France, he did it as a way to confront the tradition and use the ready-made elements to convey the increasing chaos that was consuming his mind and the world at large.
Influenced by the dystopian sci-fi scenarios and the narration system of William Faulkner, the greater story is broken into snippets of the apocalypse that is unraveling in real-time in front of our eyes. Following a similar intuitive stream-of-conscious flow, the works often start as simple drawings that get elaborated in their final form. Merely impressions rather than depictions, they together build a larger, ever-expanding narrative. Imbued with a dark sense of humor borrowed from the lost cause hero narratives such as Marshall Law, the enemy is recognized and faced, but the battles are bound to be lost.