Across the more than one hundred works presented by ENCAOUA Fine Art, each painting is paired with words: a literary fragment, a quotation, a thought borrowed from a writer whose language resonates with something held within the work. But the words are never there to explain the painting. They are there to open it.
For Sandra Encaoua, the Franco-American painter, author, and founder of TransExpressionism, this dialogue between image and language is central to her practice. A painting, in her view, is not simply the representation of something visible. It is a space of passage: a place where an intimate experience (an emotion, a memory, a rupture, a longing) can move beyond the artist and become something shared.
The sentence accompanying each work becomes part of that passage. Rather than telling the viewer what to see or feel, it creates another point of entry. The meaning ultimately belongs to the person standing before the painting, who brings to it their own memories, emotions, and history.
This search for resonance (between image and words, between the artist’s experience and the viewer’s own) runs throughout Encaoua’s work and finds one of its fullest expressions in her illustrated art books.
LoVE?, published in 2022, brings together around 60 original drawings and watercolors exploring romantic love, each accompanied by a literary quotation selected by the artist. Neither the image nor the text illustrates the other. The book approaches love as an experience capable of throwing us off balance as much as grounding us, of breaking us as much as lifting us, while the dialogue between image and language holds that tension without attempting to resolve it.
Her second book, Oct 7, was published in September 2024. It brings together a year of dated drawings and watercolors created during the months following October 7, 2023. Each work is accompanied by a passage drawn from Encaoua’s readings during that period. The text-image architecture follows the same principle as LoVE?, but the context is different: this was not a long-established, stable subject, but a response constructed in real time to events she felt could not pass without some form of confrontation or reflection. Here, the accumulation of works conveys what a single image alone could not carry.
Her third book will be available at the end of September 2026. Encaoua describes it as rooted in Lekh Lekha, the Hebrew instruction associated with Abraham’s call to leave what he knows and journey toward the unknown. The book explores what the process of truly becoming oneself actually means. The structure combining text and image that shaped her two previous books will remain at its core.
This same logic extends into her studio practice. Encaoua works primarily in oil on large-format canvases, building surfaces through accumulated layers and palette knife work. Watercolor runs as a parallel practice, more immediate in its execution and different in what it can convey. She treats the two mediums as distinct instruments rather than interchangeable techniques.
Her studio practice develops around three principal series.
Earth’s Memory (La Mémoire de la Terre) draws on landscape and geological time, reading natural surfaces as traces of forces that extend far beyond the span of a single human life.
Passing Through (Traversées) takes human emotional states as its subject: the ruptures and desires that language sometimes manages to name only much later, if it manages to name them at all.
Judaica engages with Jewish history and the question of spiritual repair, a concept in Jewish thought associated with the term tikkun.
Her illustration work outside the studio follows a related logic. As Artistic Director of the Paris publishing house Rencontres des Auteurs Francophones, she has designed covers for several of the house’s literary publications, including tribute editions devoted to Romain Gary, Albert Camus, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
She has also contributed illustrations to publications addressing prison conditions, notably for the monitoring organization Prison Insider, to materials intended to foster ecumenical dialogue, and to The Baal Shem Tov on Prayer by Rabbi DovBer Pinson.
Her exhibition and awards record, dating back to 2011, spans France and the United States, and her paintings are listed in the Artprice art market database. Venues where her work has been presented over the years include the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, the Centre Européen du Judaïsme, and satellite events held during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2017 and 2018.
Her distinctions include recognition from the Académie des Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris in 2017, the Wellington Art Society painting prize in 2021, first prize in painting from the City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, in 2022, and an artist grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2020, administered by Locust Projects in Miami.
Teaching runs alongside these activities. Encaoua leads painting and drawing classes at three locations in the eastern Paris suburbs, including the Centre Hillel in Saint-Maur and the MCJ in Nogent-sur-Marne. Classes take place on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and are open to adults of all levels. Corporate painting evenings and private lessons are also available separately.
In fall 2026, her exhibitions include the Salon des Artistes du Val-de-Marne at Villa Médicis, from September 12 to 27, as well as the Visites des Ateliers d’Artistes in Saint-Maur on October 3 and 4.
