The wall has faces

In this neighborhood abandoned by "normal people", he changes dimension:
"I found it extraordinary: in twenty years in Lyon I met one artist and there, in a week in Berlin, I knew dozens."

Thierry Noir then lives next to the famous Wall and his encounter with The Concrete Monster does not impress him.
Despite his height of 3.60 meters, he imagined the structure so much larger and more imposing.

In spite of the many upheavals he has just given to his life, the boy of Lyon quickly gets the Berliner Krankheit (disease of Berlin), this evil which obsesses the inhabitants of West Berlin who want to escape.
The air tickets are overpriced, the endless roadside checks and prospective of getaways are starveling.

One day, he is questioned in the street and asked if he is also an artist.
Considered as little gifted by his professor of handicrafts in France, he replied in the affirmative by advancing that he made music, poetry and a little painting.
"That's how my career started: pushing my possibilities to 120% to prove that I, too, was an artist."

Thierry Noir finds himself singing in a group, he draws and sells postcards in cafes, but it is a meeting that will strengthen his nascent vocation.
Christophe Bouchet, a young Frenchman like him, is expelled from his apartment Chamissoplatz and finds refuge in the Georg von Rauch Haus.
The artistic consciousness of Bouchet is more asserted than the one of Noir:
he made the Fine Arts.
The two men became friends and began to team up.
Scared by the proximity of the Wall, they decide one night in 1987 to go and paint a piece of concrete just behind their home.
"I did what I knew how to do, that is to say, not much! I did the drawing I had made in Lyon a few years earlier, which had me being fired from my Social security job."

If the Wall is far from being an immaculate canvas, many graffiti or coarse inscriptions adorn it here and there, no one had yet painted the structure in all its height and this is what Noir and Bouchet are going to do.


 

Beginning so years of hide-and-seek with the Grenzpolizisten:
with each noise of ladder, with each step or with each threat from them, they spin abandoning their mural painting for a few hours. 
 

For Thierry Noir, finally, more than the "Grepos", it is the passers-by who bother him when he paints on the Wall.
"The Berlin Wall was a taboo in German society, and to paint it was to break this taboo. Being French, I was not really concerned with all these issues. I did not realize that the reactions could have been so virulent. The neighbors, the passers-by ... all were shocked to see that I painted large colored frescoes on the Wall, some had already made small drawings, but what I did there was completely new. Often, I had to stop painting, I had to explain myself to the others over and over again. In the end, I spent more time talking than painting!"
Slaved by all these constraints, Thierry Noir's style was purified to become more efficient:
he then invented a painting per kilometer and found his signature with gigantic figures, childish in bright colors with big eyes and a big mouth.
 

While its frescoes disturbed, they finally attracted the eyes and sympathy of the people in 1987.
The success of the film of Wim Wenders, The Wings of the desire is there for something.
The German filmmaker decided to make the frescoes of Thierry Noir appear at the key moment of the film, when the image passes from black and white to color.

While he is no longer the only artist of the Wall, Noir's approach arouses a growing exaltation:
passers-by and even American soldiers are photographed in front of his paintings.
While a wind of change blows on a Europe tired by years of cold war, on 9 November 1989 the Wall falls.
For Thierry Noir, it means the destruction of his work, but he does not see it as a tear but rather as a relief.
"Finally, I could take my daughter to kindergarten in this park that was previously inaccessible and yet right in front of my house."

The Wall dismantles itself for months under the blows of pickaxe and hammer of the Berliners.
Breaches are created and the opportunity is too good for Thierry Noir who begins to paint the other slope of the Wall completely virgin, and for good reason, it is located on the old track of the death on the lands of Grepos.

While they are delighted by dropping this concrete snake that has scarred their lives and their city, the Germans do not immediately understand that they are destroying part of their history.
Fragments of the Wall were reduced to dust while others were recovered and sold for delusional sums in the four corners of the world.
Some of the pieces of Wall painted by Thierry Noir are found in Cap-Ferrat, Tokyo, Yokohama, Los Angeles, Mexico or Budapest...
Noir, who fought a great part of his life for this Wall to fall, hopes now to save what remains of it in Berlin.
The East Side Gallery, open heart memorial, is threatened by a large-scale real estate project.
For Thierry Noir, "people died behind my paintings. If one forgets his past, he can come back later."