Portfolio
Sandra Valabregue
Sandra Valabregue, whose paintings are featured in this issue, is both an artist and a scholar of medieval Kabbalah. She studied philosophy at Sorbonne, painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Jewish thought at the Hebrew University. She has lectured at Yale University, UCLA, the Rothberg School at the Hebrew University, and at Ben-Gurion University. She is also the author of Concealed and Revealed: “Eyn Sof” in Theosophic Kabbalah (2010). She lives and work in Jerusalem, and has exhibited in France, Israel, and the U.S.
In the series of paintings presented here, “Circles in the Trees,” Valabregue audaciously elaborates on a visual tradition, active since the Middle Ages, called “ilaney sefirot” (sefirotic trees). She renders those trees as maps of the divine through its various emanations. The series draws on manuscripts generously provided by the Gross Family Collection in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s largest private collections of Judaica. “From ancient manuscripts and early prints,” she explains, “I gathered images of angels, demons, kmeot (amulets), ilanot (trees), and hamsot. The idea is to create new icons from ancient ones, to revive them and give them new form.”
“Art and Kabbalah meet in my work in the dimensions of depth where secrets are concealed and conveyed,” Valabregue adds, “where the eye can discern simplicity in complexity, the part in the whole, and the whole in the part.”
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2022
