Ne Pas Toucher is a plaque with a polished aluminium finish that has been engraved with the sentence Ne Pas Toucher (Do Not Touch) in braille, a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. The work entices those who are sighted to see their own reflection, and those who are not to touch the work, leading into an act of disruption.
The braille-based paradox was devised by Merhi in the late 1990s and exhibited in Spanish as No Tocar in 2000. In 2015 an English version–Do Not Touch–was produced as a limited t-shirt edition and presented at the New Museum in New York. Then, in 2024 the Francophonie Festival, organized by the French government, commissioned the artist to make the work in French.

French braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of almost all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the standard of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. Braille works in the same way as modern binary representations for letters. It uses collections of raised dots (1s) and no dots (0s) to represent them. Each gives a bit of information in computer science terms. To make the bits easier to touch they're grouped into pairs.

The analysis of the relationships between technology and language has driven the artist to build systems that question philosophical, social, and political frameworks, leading into stunning poetic constructions. In the case of Ne Pas Toucher, Merhi examines the history of logics by introducing a new paradox, and the rules that govern the relationship between the viewer and the work of art.

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