Most painters start with what they can see. Sandra Encaoua starts with what she can feel.
The French-American artist, based in France with an established artistic presence in the United States, has spent two decades building a body of work around a framework she calls Trans Expressionism. It is not a style in the conventional sense, though her canvases carry a recognizable formal charge. It is more accurately a position: that emotion is not a vehicle for getting to the subject of a painting but the subject itself. She works in oil on canvas and in watercolor, and describes each artwork on the ENCAOUA Fine Art site as “a space of transition, breath, and vibration.”
The work is organized into three series. Earth’s Memory returns to landscape and the sense of something persisting beneath its surface. Passing Through confronts the upheavals of inner life directly. Judaica engages with Jewish history, memory, and what she describes as the repair of history through spirituality. The three series operate along different axes but share an underlying intention: to shorten the distance between what is painted and who stands in front of it. Born in Paris in 1974, Encaoua found her way toward this framework gradually, her practice shaped by equal time in both countries and by a belief, developed over years, that visual art and literary language belong in the same conversation.
Across Two Continents
Encaoua’s exhibition history since 2011 runs across both sides of the Atlantic. In France, her work has appeared at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris in 2017, 2018, and 2022, and at the Centre Européen du Judaïsme in 2025, among many other venues. In February 2025, she also participated in a two-person exhibition at the prestigious Château des Tourelles, alongside sculptor Stephane Daireaux.
In the United States, she exhibited at Spectrum Miami, the satellite art fair held during Art Basel Miami Beach week, in both 2017 and 2018, and has shown regularly in South Florida through exhibitions at Studio 18 in Pembroke Pines and venues in Fort Lauderdale and the Wellington area. She is a member of the Taylor Foundation in Paris and the Jewish Art Salon in New York. Her works have been listed on the international art market through Artprice and Drouot since 2012.
Recognition in the United States and France has tracked alongside the work. In 2022, Encaoua received the First Prize in Painting from the City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, for her Passing Through series, and the Wellington Art Society in the United States awarded her its painting prize in 2021. She also received a medal from the Académie des Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris in 2017, a private academic society that has issued annual distinctions in art, science, and letters since 1915.
On the Page
Painting is not the only form Encaoua works in. Her two published books carry the visual practice into deliberate dialogue with literary text.
[LoVE?], released in 2022, gathers approximately sixty drawings and watercolors on the subject of romantic feeling, each paired with a quotation she selected for its resonance with the image alongside.
[Oct 7], published in September 2024, collects a year of drawings and watercolors made in response to October 7, 2023, and the months that followed.
A third volume is in development. It draws on the Hebrew phrase [Lekh Lekha], the instruction given to Abraham to leave what is familiar and move toward the unknown. The book explores the inward journey toward authentic selfhood and the process of becoming oneself.
The publishing work extends beyond her own books. She serves as artistic director at Editions des Auteurs Francophones, a French-language publishing house, where she designs book covers for editions connected with writers including Camus, Saint-Exupery, and Yourcenar. Her illustrated work has also appeared in publications dealing with prison conditions and human rights, ecumenical texts, and religious study.
Teaching and What Comes Next
Alongside her studio and exhibition practice, Encaoua leads regular painting and drawing classes at three locations in the Paris suburbs, including the Centre Hillel in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and the MCJ in Nogent-sur-Marne. Sessions run on weekday afternoons and evenings and are open to adults at all skill levels. The stated aim, as she describes it in her course materials, is less about technique than about helping each student develop their own creative language.
Corporate painting evenings, art nights, and private lessons are also available.
Upcoming exhibitions include the Salon des Artistes du Val de Marne at Villa Medicis from September 12 to 27, 2026, followed by the Visites des Ateliers d’Artistes in Saint Maur on October 3 and 4, 2026.
Her longer-term aim, Encaoua says, is to develop Trans Expressionism into a recognized international movement, one that treats painting as a language rather than a picture, and as something concerned not with depicting the world but with showing what the world does to us.
That is a sizable claim for any painter to stake. Whether it reads as ambition or description will probably depend on which canvas you are standing in front of.