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Nicole Joye: My photographic approachPhotographing, loving to photograph, this passion that has inhabited me for so many years does not obey an abstract approach or a conceptual problematic. I am only interested in the sensitive and immediate relationship to the world. A world, which, for me, merges with the enchanted irruption of the singular. This is why we do not find any recurring theme. The love of the world as I experience it is the love of diversity in all its heterogeneity: mountains, urban landscapes, street scenes, faces, lights, human activity, improbable encounters, details or ensembles. All my photos aim to express the richness of the world. It is not really me who seeks to capture the world, it is the world that immediately imposes itself on me by its infinite power of surprise and astonishment. It is this spectacle of diversity and the unexpected that prevails. I am in the sensitive receptivity of reality, I do not order the images that it gives me. Testimony of my love of the world, these photos would like to share this feeling, source of infinitely renewed happiness.
Gilles Lipovetsky : My photographic approachEvery photograph serves a purpose: to capture the sparkle in an eye, reveal a state of mind, convey a fleeting emotion, or celebrate the beauty of a summer or winter landscape. Photography is not merely about recording an image; it is about choosing a moment, giving it meaning, and allowing it to continue existing.Why photograph? To this classic question, Nicole Joye’s exhibition at the Zet Gallery offers an answer of a new kind: to capture the unexpected at the heart of everyday life. Do not look here for a philosophical message or an aesthetic manifesto. The artist claims no political or social stance. Her work is neither reportage, nor humanitarian, nor intimate. Her images elude the great aesthetic schools and categories: they are neither realist nor surrealist, neither sensationalist nor glamorous, nor kitsch. And no central “subject” structures the whole or guarantees its thematic coherence. What emerges is a free, wandering, resolutely eclectic approach. A photographic practice guided by a single demand: to share the wonder born from encountering the unexpected.Far from scenes of ordinary life, with its burdens, monotony, and anonymity. What Nicole Joye captures are scenes that share a common trait: they surprise the eye and the mind. “What is the purpose of art,” wrote Bergson, “if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside and within us, things that did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness?” Clearly, Nicole Joye moves away from this approach. What matters to her is to photograph what surprises, what “strikes” our imagination, what shocks—but not in a chic way—what astonishes, sometimes unsettles, but never falls into sensationalism. On the lookout for the spark of the unexpected and for surprise, what she captures can be light, amusing, but also strange, unusual, disconcerting, always singular. In this, Nicole Joye seems to follow in the footsteps of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his famous “decisive moment,” sharing his fundamental demands: refusal to crop, rejection of any staging, fidelity to the event as it occurs. Like him, she affirms the absolute primacy of the real and the power of what emerges without modifying intervention: for her, nothing is more fascinating than reality captured in its raw presence, sometimes capable of rivaling or even surpassing fiction. But the similarity ends there. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, Nicole Joye seeks neither the essence of a moment nor the timelessness hidden within a singular instant. She also moves away from what constitutes a cardinal demand of the master of black-and-white silver photography: the correctness of composition, the geometric logic of the image. For him, the “decisive moment” is not just the capture of an opportune moment: it presupposes a rigorous agreement between the configuration of reality and formal organization. The beautiful image arises when lines, masses, and visual rhythms arrange themselves according to an almost mathematical necessity, giving the moment its fullness and evidence. Geometry is not decorative: it is the very condition of the intelligibility and force of the moment, the place where form and meaning coincide. Nothing of the sort with Nicole Joye. What she privileges in this series is neither regulated composition nor the balance of forms, but the irruption of the exceptional: the unusual, what thwarts the déjà-vu, escapes perceptual schemas, and breaks with expected configurations. Her photographs aim neither for harmony nor formal necessity, but for the gap, the slight dissonance, the visual “accident”: not the “classical” composition, but surprise and the beauty of what is strange. They do not seek to stabilize the gaze in a readable architecture, but to surprise it, to displace it. What is offered to the viewer is always singular, atypical, and remains beyond any assignment of truth: neither true nor false, simply experienced. Where Cartier-Bresson strove for a form of order, an ideal coincidence between visual structure and meaning, Nicole Joye situates herself on the side of contingency: she welcomes what happens without rule, without necessity, without any justification other than its power to astonish and delight. These scenes of the unexpected are in no way part of the surrealist spirit and the “convulsive beauty” dear to André Breton. They are nonetheless what Breton calls in Mad Love “finds,” sudden appearances rich with a “magical circumstantial beauty,” born from the unpredictable encounter between the gaze and an event. A flat or trivial photographic project? Not at all. The unexpected and surprise are in no way secondary matters. From the “decisive moment,” we move to another regime of the image: that of the magical moment of the unexpected, a moment linked to chance, to the luck of encountering the unforeseen, what happens without being sought. No lesson in truth is delivered here. What is offered is the pleasure of the unplanned, the non-ordinary, the singular. It is not truth that is aimed at, but the pleasure of what intrigues, surprises, and subtly intensifies the experience of the world. Perhaps sub-philosophical, but by no means insignificant, this exhibition keeps its distance from any didactic aim: it privileges the moment of surprise as it arises on a street corner, in urban space, or around the bend of a landscape: a brief flash, with no other purpose than to be experienced, almost by grace. And that is no small thing. This attention to the unexpected can certainly be linked to modernist culture and its cult of systematic novelty. What is valued and highlighted here, indeed, is difference, the departure from the ordinary.However, for Nicole Joye, the unexpected is in no way confused with the modernist logic of the new. Where the avant-gardes made rupture their guiding principle—through the negation of tradition, stylistic discontinuities, deconstructive radicality—her work moves in the opposite direction. It does not seek to provoke or invent an absolutely new style. It is rather an aesthetic of observing contingency: not producing the new as a principle by creating formal dissonance, but welcoming what happens: what emerges without necessity, without program, without prior intention. The unexpected is not manufactured here; it is encountered by chance during the photographer’s wanderings. Her photographs do not seek to disarticulate forms or subvert figurative codes and norms. They keep their distance from any work that tests the boundaries of art, from any spectacularization of the new. What they privilege are the micro-events of reality, those minute changes that, without breaking from the world, imperceptibly alter its perception. This is not revolutionary art, but an art of reception: reception of chance, of accident, of what might not have been. An aesthetic of “it happens,” rather than the voluntarism of the avant-garde tabula rasa: far from modernist scandal. Her photos are a hymn not to the grand theater of formal mutations, but to the singularities encountered as life goes by. From this arises a simple form of enjoyment: that of the small surprises of daily life, without emphasis or revolution of the gaze, these modest experiences of the eye and mind that, without being grandiose, nonetheless have the power to create a contemporary poetics. Thus, by quietly and occasionally thwarting monotony and weariness, they help to re-enchant our daily lives. A lesson in wisdom. What would life be without the flashes of the unexpected? Nothing but a long “dull plain.” Camus said: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” One may doubt this. For in the eternal repetition of the same, without the unexpected, we are condemned to nothing but boredom. The beauty of this exhibition is that it pays homage not to a great ethical or aesthetic referent, but to the small, astonishing experiences of daily life, so necessary to the charm of living. Gilles Lipovetsky April 2026
Helena Mendes Pereira : Time and Space, Photography and Painting : The work of Nicole JoyeWriting about Nicole Joye (Tunisia, France, 1957), after Gilles Lipovetsky (France, 1944), is no easy task. There is absolutely nothing that could be better said or written. I therefore tried to find the missing place of discourse and called in reinforcements. In 1977, Susan Sontag (1933-2004) published On Photography, a seminal work on artistic photography and its political, ideological and social power, in which the writer and essayist intertwines art theory, philosophy, visual studies and cultural criticism in an essential work that has become timeless. Sontag’s central question is whether images awaken political consciousness or anaesthetise us, considering photography as a form of appropriation of the world. At one point in the book, the author reflects on painting and photography : « The real difference between the aura of a photograph and that of a painting lies in a different relation to time.The ravages of time tend to work against paintings. But part of the intrinsic interest of photographs, and a large source of their aesthetic value, comes precisely from the transformations time imposes on them, from the way they escape the intentions of their makers. Given enough time, many photographs do aquire an aur. (…) While paintings or poems do not improve, do not become more interesting simply by ageing, all photographs are interesting and moving if they are old enough. »1 Nicole Joye was born in Tunisia and holds dual French and Swiss nationality. Her academic backgroungd lies in Anglo-Saxon literature and contemporary art history, and she worked professionally as a translator and a langage teacher. She lived in several countries including Spain and Canada, and it was in Madrid that she undertook much of her training in the visual arts,responding to an inner vocation. She currently lives in Grenoble, at the foot of the French Alps. Her artistic practice encompasses both painting and photography:painting represents an encounter with herself, within the studio, while photography is the result of her gaze upon the world during the extensive periods she spends travelling. Our meeting and my first encounter with the photographic series « Sensitive Geometries », in which the artist establishes a dialog in the form of diptychs between two images sharing thematic connections and/or common motifs, took place during one of those journeys. Photographing is always a way of seeing;itcarries the direction and attention of a particular gaze, and I was especially struck by her choice of shapes and visual compositions, suggestive of someone wandering through streets in 360-degree turns, attentive to reflections, shadows and subtle signs. The construction of the image is always highly pictorial and rooted in the langage of painting, revealing the studio work and its impact on the development of a photographic vocabulary. In the series « Chromatic Superpositions », we find relationships that awaken curiosity about both process and time (of thought and production), between the process that records reality and the one that deconstructs it, making the influence of painting as a technology for thinking ohotography particularly evident. In the series « Everything is a matter of decor », meanwhile, it seems we are halfway through the discovery of the detail or setting that painting work will later deconstruct. Nicole Joye was one of the artists we chose to present within the framework of the protocol with the School of Economics, Management and Political Science of the University of Minho. For that exhibition, we selected the series « Scenes of the unexpected » due to the way it reveals an attentive search and the ocasional discovery of contexts in which photography captures the improbable and inscribes it wuthin timelessness. Each phtograph contains a story and, through the establishment of relationships and points of encounter between the images and their audiances, each acquired narrative and interpretative layers. The works no longer contained only the time and space in which Nicole Joye captured them but also accumulated the viewpoints and imaginative framings of different audiences, therby acquiring the aura Susan Sontag spoke of. This is why, for this exhibition at ZET art gallery in Lisbon, we wished to retain the title previously explored in Braga, renewing the invitation for the assemblage of new perspectives upon these unusual moments, which so strongly distinguish Nicole Joye’s photographs and endow it with its own langage. At the same time, we have taken the opportunity of this exhibition to bring together different series from the artiste’s body of work, seeking to evoke the relevance and originality of her artistic proposal. Nicole Joye straightforwardly rejects the idea that her photography should be understood as a political device. Nonetheless, the attention it summons and the imagination it stimulates, the possibilities it invites us to recreate through her images, are acts that run counter to a world of individualism, lackinf self-regulation of egos and profoundly toxic. If an artwork compells us to pause and uncover its secrets, that act is, in itself a profound political gesture, one of enormous impact and transformative power within the tribe of influences. This solo exhibition by Nicole Joye allows audiences to confront the different ways in which she tells us a story, transporting us to a particular moment. We therefore present amost fifty works, produced beween 2012 and 2026, that promise un expected dialogues and a reflection on the very narrative that photography can convey in and of itself. Helena Mendes Pereira
Aline Guillermet : Punctum and Blind Spots, 2025 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.
Gilles Lipovetsky: Fortuitous sensitive geometries , 2022 It would be hard to find geometrical shapes more devoid of affect than those we remember from our school days. Only angles, straight lines, "cylinders, spheres, cones" (Cézanne). An impersonal space of cold rigor, the world of geometry gives itself out as the opposite of emotional experience. However, what if geometry, the very one that dwells in and makes up reality, was a source of affects? Such is Nicole Joye's choice who, through her photographs, endeavors to make us feel the emotional power that shapes the sensitive world: the geometry of the industrial, architectural or urban cosmos, but also the geometry of some natural shapes. Sometimes, these different environments escape their austere fate and become a source of esthetical vibrations. The interest of the "Sensitive geometries" series lies in making us see the dreamy, playful and imaginative side of Nicole Joye's work, revealed by abstract horizontal, vertical and oblique lines. She has a talent for making us contemplate this alchemy of everyday life. Thus, photography succeeds in giving esthetical depth to these paradoxical "sensitive geometries". Nicole Joye has no organized plan or predetermined horizon and she does not consider her work as the illustration of a conceptual or theoretical "idea". She is a tireless walker wandering in the streets, in the mountains and along sea shores, filled with the wonder of the world, its inexhaustible diversity, its enchanting colors which she captures as days and seasons go by. This is the moment when the second phase of the artist's work on this collection of photographs becomes possible: she brings together what, at first sight, has nothing in common, devising "pairs" of photos, each one of which was taken for its own sake, for its own idiosyncracy. Through this improbable encounter, the effect of the sensitive geometries ends up with increased potency. There is indeed magic in this encounter between distant universes vibrating in unison. Nicole Joye does not impose anything to the eye of the viewer and does not want to demonstrate anything: she weds what was discovered fortuitously. When we watch Nicole Joye's photographs, chance becomes an emotional necessity. And so it is, that a work that manifestly revives the practice of Beauty nevertheless belongs wholly to contemporary art. The "open work" asserts itself not through the deconstruction of craft, representation, perspective, beauty, or any other artistic landmarks, but rather in a combination of reflexivity and aesthetic contemplation that takes place in the viewer. The idea of beauty is not in abeyance; there is no intention to destroy its harmony as with modern art, but rather a reinvestment of its problematic, by way of a compulsary uncertainty, compelling the public to bring their own doubts, interrogations, resonances, reasons. A spirit of contemporary art drives the spectacle of these sensitive geometries. Each viewer is engaged in a paradoxical and particular experience that merits attention. On the one hand, these photos have an undeniably "classical" aspect, given their aesthetic and representational dimension. Immersing the viewer in a kind of happy contemplation, they seem to have no connexion with a contemporary art that manifests indifference to the question of "Beauty". Yet, on the other hand, chromatic pairs mandate a reflexive attitude: we are obliged to ask ourselves the question: why these matches of photos? What do they evoke? What was the intention of the artist? We must appreciate this artistic work, since, despite belonging to contemporary art, it also aims to bring the traditional investment of Beauty back into the limelight, and in so doing, restores its legitimacy.
Tribune Rives-Lac Genève November 2022 Exhibition at the CCM in Cologny. Geneva. CH Cologny, on a mild autumn day, a new opening is being prepared. Nicole Joye's colorful photos and paintings are hung with precise geometry on walls that are not always symmetrical. Joëlle Gervaix always delights us with her quality perspective on the artists she presents. Nicole Joye is still a real one. 2000, 2010, 2020 parade on the walls of this historic building. The works make you dream...
Gilles Lipovetsky: The painting of Nicole Joye Nicole Joye's painting is magic, love, the infinite intoxication of color. Color, nothing but color, which triumphs in abstract and erratic spaces. But this lush chromatic palette is the antithesis of decorative games: it is the very expression of emotional life, its exuberance and its surprises. If here, everything is abstract, it is nevertheless the flesh of the earth and living bodies which never ceases to vibrate the eye and the sensitivity of the viewer.
Le Petit Bulletin, Grenoble, 2020 Exhibition at the Alter-Art gallery, Grenoble, 2020Photo / Exhibited at the Alter-Art gallery, Nicole Joye's photographic diptychs surprise. One of them even turns out to be particularly surprising. Discovery. This is an exhibition which should delight those who consider photography more as a formal construction than as a possible fictional or documentary image. Taken over several years in very different locations, Nicole Joye's color photographs play on the possibilities of connections and formal similarities between the photos. Exhibited as a diptych, the images respond to and complement each other. The smooth reflections of a glass building echo the shimmering undulations of a liquid surface, the subtle imperfection of the horizontality of the successive steps of a staircase dialogues with that of the slats of a blind... In this pleasant ensemble , however, a diptych seemed more thrilling to us. The first shot shows, in the front of a store, muscular plastic mannequins which appear like pale imitations of reproductions of ancient statues themselves reproduced from originals in a museum whose architecture can be guessed behind -shot of the second shot. A diptych which refers to the nature of the photographic image which, itself reproducible, is only a possible reproduction of the visible. At the chance of sensitive geometries (Nicole Joye) At the Alter-Art gallery until March 1st
Ken Lum: The Paintings of Nicole Joye There is psychological depth in Ms. Joye's paintings, but it is restricted to a very limited dimension. It is interesting to note that abstract painting today is more closely associated with emotional indifference and hard-edge techniques, as well as monochrome in all its variations. It is as if abstract painting can only be convincing with the addition of an imposing dimension. Nicole Joye's paintings are powerful precisely because she attempts to advance the pleasure of informal expression by opposing a common orthodoxy of painting. The fact that her paintings are also technically successful only reinforces her position.
Tom Skipp: Forms and superpositions in the painting of Nicole Joye Sometimes transparent shapes, allowing us to reveal a superposition of layers which hide an enigma in which the gaze gets lost in its desire for understanding. Natural or conceptual compositions that cleverly deviate our gaze from the essence, from the origin of the painting itself, awakening in us the suspicion that there is something that sight cannot grasp, as if the distance between the viewer and the background of the canvas could not be crossed.