The Rabbis teach us: “Know from where you come, and where you are going, and before Whom you are destined to give an account and reckoning.” (Pirkei Avot 3:1) Life is a journey. The ultimate goal of life’s journey is to achieve maximum spiritual heights and to give an account before the King of Kings. We start our personal journey at different points, for which we have no control. It is through this journey that we attempt to dismantle that which needs dismantling and to rebuild or to renovate that which needs renovation.

To aid in our journey we are given tools. Each individual’s tools are raw and unique. Through our education, experience, family and more, we polish and perfect these tools and may use them to uplift ourselves. The tools of an artist may include words, paints, brushes, pallet knives, canvas to name a few. Together the artist will experience and share life’s challenges as the artist travels through the journey.

The exhibition “Post-Renovation” is a collection of paintings by multi-disciplinary Orthodox Jerusalem artist Raquel Sanchez, from a period covering several years, which attempts to illustrate, illuminate and understand the process of self renovation and to where this can lead. Sanchez did not grow up observant. Three major phenomena impacted her life—her return to a more religious observance in the 1990’s, leaving Israel during the intifada in the early 2000’s and her return to Jerusalem in the aftermath of the devastation of hurricane Sandy (2012). These were central factors that aided her to recreate and renovate herself as she grew to what she has become today. Her unique background and life’s experiences have all contributed.

Raquel Sanchez was born in Paris, France (on US soil) in the early 1960’s. This was a unique period for artists and their families. In her early years she would call many places home, yet one constant was the artists flowing through her environs and travels. The countless schools of her youth were mainly science and art oriented. She grew up against the backdrop of languages and cultures, surrounded by writers and artists in places ranging from New York to Ibiza, Morocco to Venezuela and the list goes on. While living in Ibiza, her classmates were children of renowned movie actors and stars. Raquel was influenced by visiting artists such as the Irish singer and political activist Bob Geldof. While in elementary school in Essaouira, Morocco, Jimi Hendrix would accompany her and together they colored with Crayola crayons. During her younger years in the Spain of Franco’s regime she resided and was educated in international schools on an island, near the foreign service influence of her father, who resided on the mainland. Foreign influences were prohibited in Spanish schools under El Franco.

In 1981 she graduated from Edward R. Murrow High School in New York, renowned for its fine art education. Between classes and after school, she drew and painted in the school yard with Jean-Michel Basquiat. They would speak comfortably in French and Spanish as Sanchez taught and practiced one-line drawings with Basquiat. They considered one another “besties” as he attempted to recruit her to do graffiti in Brooklyn. Later on, Basquiat would try to convince Raquel to go to New York City to paint with him in his East Village groups. Rather than joining, she worked at Interview Magazine, at fashion hubs for the elite, and art galleries in the village where occasional visits with Keith Haring became part of her artistic transcript from which she draws.

While at Brooklyn College, Raquel spent time with the American poet Allen Ginsberg and corralled around his entourage of poets more freely than most due to Ginsberg’s friendship with her father, Juan Sanchez Pelaez, the renowned Venezuelan Poet.

Sanchez Pelaez, born in 1922, is the National Literature Prize winner and was nominated for a Nobel Prize prior to his passing in 2003. He is considered the poet who outlined the distinctive form of Venezuelan surrealistic poetry utilized until today. Known as “The Maestro”, the Poet Laureate Sanchez Pelaez’s work and form of writing has influenced generations of writers and this Venezuelan form of writing surrealism is studied in Universities to this day. Connected to the poets of the Beat generation, yet more internationally acclaimed, he became famous for this form while studying at the University of Chile with the Mandragora group.

Raquel Sanchez is a member of the Israel Association of Writers in English. She is a published poet, critiqued by the Canadian-American poet laureate Mark Strand. Strand occasionally would speak with her about translations and, through his friendship with her father, shared his thoughts with her and with Sanchez Pelaez as they critiqued her poetry. Her Tel Aviv experience in the early 1990’s made her life-long friends with elder talents who continue to influence her writing.

In the early 1990’s, after receiving her Master’s Degree from Yeshiva University, Sanchez founded The Rose Institute (which later became Crossroads) an organization working with at-risk English-speaking youth in Jerusalem. Following the successful establishment and growth of the organization, Sanchez returned to New York in 2001 where she became a PhD student at New York University. Raquel remained active as a writer with Slam groups and performed as a poet in a multitude of East Village, West Village and Uptown venues. In 2003, while still living in New York, Raquel rediscovered painting. Her paintings in New York were mostly an attempt at regaining inspiration following the death of her father and repolishing her skills in the plastic arts.

Sanchez moved to Israel in 2013 following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy which left her severely affected. In Jerusalem, where she fully devoted herself to painting, she blossomed. Following several exhibitions, in 2016 she began exhibiting at Rosenbach Contemporary, a Jerusalem contemporary art gallery dedicated to promoting contemporary Israeli Art.

Raquel’s paintings, her personal voice, are an emotional process of observation, search, and interpretation of the surrealistic meaning of existence itself. Her artistic language is unique, one which has its foundation in the masters of Impressionism and Post Impressionism, instilled with technique of the action painters, mysticism of the surrealists and language of the Modern and Contemporary Artists of her youth. Yet, a certain metaphoric voice in her work would speak; this voice seemed to be curiously unconnected to the past.

It was not until Sanchez translated 18 of her father’s poems from Spanish to English that she realized the underlying influence and connection of her lineage and inheritance as an artist; the surrealism of her father’s work, his voice as it influenced her. This exhibit is an archetypal acknowledgement of her connecting the different voices between the written and the plastic arts.

Raquel Sanchez and her father both use similes and metaphors, whether in words or in paint to describe deep conceptual transformative imagery. Their commonality is the ethereal coming to life in the mind’s eye as well as the physical eye. Yet it is Raquel’s constant search and striving for Absolute (Divine) Truth that has brought her to this point where she may view herself as being at a stage of continuous construction within the light of Post-Renovation.