Some things disappear without ever entirely leaving us. A place, a memory, an emotion, a moment in time: their presence can linger long after they are gone. This idea lies at the heart of Nagori, one of the latest paintings by Sandra Encaoua, the Franco-American artist who founded the TransExpressionism movement and runs ENCAOUA Fine Art, and more broadly, at the heart of a body of work shaped by memory, transformation, and what remains.
The Japanese word Nagori evokes the lingering presence of something that has ended: the trace of a season as it disappears, the beauty of what remains after something has passed. It is an idea that resonates deeply with Encaoua’s work, where landscapes, emotions, and personal or collective memory are rarely treated as fixed subjects. They are traces: something to move through, transform, and ultimately allow to resonate differently within each viewer.
Created in 2026, Nagori is a 146-by-97-centimeter oil painting incorporating silver leaf. The work will be presented as part of Encaoua’s next solo exhibition in 2027, with further details to be announced.
For the Franco-American artist and founder of TransExpressionism, painting is not simply about representing what can be seen. It is about giving form to what cannot always be said: what we carry, what we lose, what transforms us, and what remains.
This search for resonance runs through Encaoua’s entire practice. Her paintings are built through layers, gestures, textures, transparency, and material, allowing the image to emerge progressively rather than simply illustrating a predetermined idea.
Watercolor follows a different internal logic. More immediate in its execution, it allows her to capture something that might have disappeared before an oil painting was ready. Encaoua approaches these two practices as distinct projects, rather than simply two different speeds of the same process.
Born in Paris in 1974, she spent several years in South Florida beginning in 2015, exhibiting during Art Basel Miami in 2017 and 2018, as well as at various venues in Miami, Pembroke Pines, and Fort Lauderdale. She returned to France several years later and now maintains her studio in the eastern Paris area.
TransExpressionism is the name she gives to the movement she founded. For Encaoua, the term carries a precise meaning. Where twentieth-century Expressionism used the distortion of the visible world to give form to inner states, her approach asks the canvas to go further: painting becomes a space in which emotion undergoes a process of transformation, rather than a place where it is simply depicted.
In her view, the viewer is invited to discover something of their own within the work—something that belongs to their own story rather than to the artist’s. At the heart of her practice is a search for resonance.
Her studio practice unfolds along three distinct lines.
Earth’s Memory (La Mémoire de la Terre) takes landscape as its subject, reading land and geological forms as traces of accumulated time, as a palimpsest.
Passing Through (Traversées) explores human emotional life in its least resolved states: the turbulence that precedes the moment when grief or desire begins to take the form it will eventually assume. Works from this series were presented at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris in 2017 and 2018.
The third series, Judaica, brought Encaoua toward history, and more specifically toward the question of how the Jewish experience of historical violence might be transcended rather than simply endured. She presented numerous works from this series at the Centre Européen du Judaïsme in Paris in 2025.
Her full exhibition history, from 2012 to the present, across France, the United States, and elsewhere in Europe, is documented on the studio’s website.
In practice, these three series continually inform one another. The palette knife can build both geological texture and emotional turbulence through similar gestures and pressure. What holds the body of work together is a sustained interest in what accumulates—and what remains.
That interest has also extended into publishing.
In 2022, Encaoua published LoVE?, bringing together original drawings and watercolors with literary texts exploring the experience of love in its full range. The format was deliberate: visual work and written language are placed alongside one another, neither illustrating the other, but each opening the other to the reader.
In September 2024 came Oct 7, conceived during the twelve months following the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. The book brings together a year of drawings and watercolors created in response to that period, moving through it one work at a time.
Her third book, Lekh Lekha, will be released at the end of September 2026. The Hebrew phrase Lekh Lekha is the instruction given to Abraham to leave what is familiar and journey toward the unknown. Encaoua uses it as a framework for exploring the inner journey of becoming fully and authentically oneself. Like her two previous books, it will bring together original artworks and literary texts.
Alongside her studio and publishing work, she teaches painting and drawing to adults in several communities in the Paris area, including Nogent-sur-Marne, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, and Le Perreux-sur-Marne. She teaches a range of techniques—including oil, watercolor, acrylic, and palette knife—several days a week.
She also offers corporate painting evenings and private lessons, and has discussed plans to pursue training in art therapy, extending her practice toward a more formal exploration of the relationship between artistic creation and emotional well-being.
She is Artistic Director at Rencontres des Auteurs Francophones, a Paris publishing house, where she creates cover artwork for literary editions, including volumes devoted to Romain Gary, Albert Camus, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This cover work engages with the same fundamental question as her studio practice: what can visual form convey that written language alone cannot, and can the two together open something that neither could achieve on its own?
Her work has appeared on the Artprice and Drouot art market indices since 2012.
Among the distinctions on her record is an artist grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, administered through Locust Projects in Miami in 2020. She received the medal of the Académie Arts-Sciences-Lettres in Paris in 2017. In 2022, she received first prize in painting from the City of Pembroke Pines, Florida, after receiving the Wellington Art Society prize the previous year. In 2025, she received the PASSCOP Photography Festival Award in France.
Her original works are available through the studio website, as well as on Saatchi Art and Artsper.
Encaoua has an active fall schedule. The Villa Médicis exhibition runs through September 27, followed by the Salon Artistique d’Étampes from September 26 to October 11, and the opening of her Saint-Maur studio on October 3 and 4 as part of the Journées Nationales des Artistes.
