Prélude, 2010

Rachel Yedid  

Rachel Yedid is a French multidisciplinary artist born in 1977 who lives and works between Paris, France & Jerusalem, Israel. She grew up marked by a severe autoimmune disease that prevented her from attending a traditional school. Her childhood and adolescence unfolded outside institutional frameworks, nurtured by an intimate environment of art and music. She spent much of her time in the studio of her uncle, Patricio Zamora (Prix de Rome), who introduced her to art through pastel and oil painting techniques. This unconventional upbringing, infused with literature, poetry, music, and painting, forged a deeply introspective and singular vision of the world. Yedid is also a pianist and composer. She later trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Visual Arts Theatre in Jerusalem. Her canvases are constructed like inhabited stages, often inspired by actors, dancers, and musicians. For years, she painted in the solitude of abandoned spaces, nourished by reading, poetry, and sound. Her collaborations with composers and orchestras led to large pictorial cycles inspired by operas, from Mozart to Wozzeck. Her figures, frequently portrayed with closed eyes, embody a dual perspective: one of inward retreat and one offered to the gaze of the observer. In a world oversaturated with images, tensions, and relentless noise, my art chooses closed eyes to open another gaze — the gaze of the inner soul. Paradoxically, it is in darkness, in that space of withdrawal, where liberation emerges: a singular, poetic resistance against the visual cacophony of our time.