Esther Guenassia

Born in Paris in 1964, Esther Guenassia got involved very early in the artistic path. She spent her childhood studying music (she was a violinist in an orchestra) and attending the Louvre museum. From the age of ten, she enrolled at Cours Martenot and began painting.

While pursuing higher business studies (she obtained a postgraduate diploma from the French Fashion Institute in 1987), she continued to study drawing and painting at Cours Charpentier and then at the Ateliers des Beaux Arts in Paris. .

In 1988, after an internship at Publicis, she was approached by an Israeli textile designer, Eliakim, with whom she would stage the Man Ray exhibition at the Bagatelle Pavilion. The following year, Eliakim entrusted him with the management of his Show Room, Place de la Bastille in Paris. Until 1991, she continued to express her innate sense of color and her love of materials by creating textile collections for Europe and Japan.

Her personal quest leads her to search for her roots. In the 90s, Esther made several trips to Israel and met Jewish mysticism there. Although she had not previously received a religious education, she discovered a fascinating world and returned to Judaism through this path.
It was at this time that she began her pictorial research on the symbolism of the Hebrew letters.
Passionate about this study, she went to the United States to live an experience there for several years within various movements related to Hasidout and Kabbalah. These meetings allowed him to discover an essential thing: the existence of a different Reality.
She who comes from a great Parisian school, from the world of fashion and appearances, she discovers through study and interior work, the importance of going towards the other, of forgetting oneself, key essential allowing access to another perception, a perception that extends beyond the limitation of the 5 senses. Esther Guenassia apprehends this Transcendent Reality and gives us the key through her paintings of Hebrew letters. For her, this sacred alphabet, in its symbolic container, carries the divine secret and the Infinite Light without which Matter would remain inert.

His paintings are scattered in private collections in France, the United States and Israel.

Since 2002, she has lived and worked in Jerusalem, exhibiting regularly, and leading art therapy workshops combining painting and symbolism.