Une oreille noir et blanc, Mural in Paris 6e Arrondissement, France
Une oreille noir et blanc is a wall painting on a building in a side street of Paris's 6th arrondissement. It shows a single large black ear drawn with simple, clean lines against the wall, standing out from the surrounding stone facades.
The artist from Strasbourg began placing ear images on city walls in 2020 as a way to turn her own difficulties with written French into a public practice. The series later reached different neighborhoods of Paris, where each new ear continued the same playful reflection on language and attention.
This painting plays with the French saying "les murs ont des oreilles," a familiar way of saying that private talk can still be overheard. A passerby who recognizes the phrase sees the wall as a quiet listener, which turns a simple walk into a small moment of shared humor.
Walk slowly along the smaller streets of the neighborhood, because the image is modest in size and can appear suddenly. The painting is directly on a public wall, so you can stop and look at it from the sidewalk without needing any ticket or permission.
The simple ear works as a personal signature as well as an image, tied to the artist's own relationship with words. Her approach to street art treats a blank wall as something that can hold a quiet joke or a piece of local language, waiting to be noticed by a patient walker.
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