Punctum and Blind Spots Aline Guillermet Punctum and Blind Spots Nicole Joye trained as a painter in the early 1990s. Alongside this, she developed a photographic practice that has since become central to her work. In 2020, Joye began combining the two media to create the Chromatic Superpositions, medium-sized color photographs repainted by hand with ink. The most recent series of Chromatic Superpositions, titled Melody in Blue (2023–24), consists of sixteen 30x30 cm works exploring the theme of water in different forms: confined, sanitized, stagnant, fluid, frozen. The photographs highlight aquatic motifs reworked in ink with shades of blue, often contrasted with their complementary colors: yellow, orange, and red. White is also prominently featured among the pictorial additions in the series, suggesting a veil encroaching upon reality, through which something essential might still be glimpsed: the outline of a body emerging from a swimming pool or launching itself onto a frozen pond. Floating white paint discs appear repeatedly across different prints—sun, moon, or an oversized snowflake—like so many blind spots. The artistic practice of reworking photographs with paint dates back to late 19th-century Pictorialism and reached a peak with the recognition of Gerhard Richter’s overpainted photographs (Übermalungen) as artworks in the mid-2000s. While Pictorialists sought to aestheticize existing black-and-white photographs, Richter created a new genre of hybrid works by dragging or pressing failed family photographs into layers of accumulated paint on his "squeegees"—long wooden rulers he uses to scrape excess paint off his abstract canvases—at the end of a workday. However, Nicole Joye’s approach resembles neither the atmospheric coloring of existing prints by the Pictorialists nor the accidental layering of personal snapshots characteristic of Richter’s Übermalungen. Each Chromatic Superposition is carefully orchestrated, borrowing its geometric aesthetic from the color field and hard edge movements of abstract painting. Large areas of ink are applied to selected motifs within the photograph and, in a dialectic running throughout the series, the paint both conceals and reveals minute details of everyday life. In one example titled Paradise, the eye is immediately drawn to capital letters in yellow spelling out the eponymous word, standing out against a sky-blue painted background above a building, and to the turquoise waters of a swimming pool. This first glimpse of an idyllic seaside resort is complicated by paint drips running across the pool and hurriedly applied vertical white paint marks on the right side of the image, imbuing the urban landscape with an eerie atmosphere. Buried under the paint, emerging from a narrow gap in the white streak, the partial silhouette of a young woman appears: a bent knee, a hip, the upper half of a back covered with wet hair. Here, the white paint applied to the print functions like a photographic shutter: it frames and isolates a detail of the background, presenting it to the viewer as a small revelation. Suddenly, it becomes impossible not to see the young woman who, just a moment before, was masked by the paint. In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes named this kind of detail the punctum of a photograph—“that accident which pricks me.” “I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that it is a new photo I am looking at, one that now holds a superior value for me.” The analogy between the structural dynamic that Barthes identifies as the eidos of photography in Camera Lucida and the Chromatic Superpositions suggests that, in some ways, these hybrid works privilege the photographic medium. Yet, they are also fundamentally paintings: each photograph is, above all, a roadmap for an elaborate pictorial composition. Unlike Barthes’ punctum, the ink intrusions are not accidental—Nicole Joye masks existing structures to invent new architectures. The photograph is not just a model; it is also fundamentally an opportunity to bring a new abstract painting to life.