The Blind is a Braille graffiti artist in France, Nantes. His art is interesting as it needs at least two to understand , one to see and one to touch.
“Do not touch...” When she ran her fingers over this Braille inscription on the wall of the Sainte-Croix church, in the city of Nantes, western France, the young blind woman burst out laughing.""To fully understand what makes The Blind tick, you need to know about the artist's teenage years. During the mid-1990s, he was thrown out of a museum for touching an impressionist painting during a school outing. “There was a rough and uneven texture,” he says. He was traumatized by the incident.
From then on, and despite being dyslexic, he started to focus on words and letters through the prism of graffiti. After studying at the Nantes Beaux-Arts fine arts university, he decided to make a career of graffiti. Since it was illegal and anti-establishment, he needed to find the ideal place to do it, and to act fast.
He came up with the idea of making graffiti for the blind in 2004: “I realized that blind people didn’t have access to our urban art, even though it’s meant to be seen by as many people as possible.” That is when he started learning Braille. Pretty soon, his messages started appearing on the walls of Nantes. Then in Vienne, Budapest, Helsinki, Saint Petersburg and even... Chernobyl!
Most of his graffiti has a double meaning, and often relies on a vocabulary that refers to sight and touch. They also relate to the environment in which they are located: he wrote “Dark mood” (Broyer du noir) in the Paris catacombs, “Love is blind” (L’amour rend aveugle) in Venice, “Not seen, not caught” (Pas vu, pas pris) on the wall of the Nantes courthouse, “Your money or your sight” (La Bourse ou la vue) in front of the Brussels stock exchange. Blind people appreciate it: in Brussels, the Braille League hired him to decorate their offices." (Worldcrunch)
::: The artist's website: The Blind
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photograph via The Blind
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