Effervescence

Sandrine Castellan builds her work as a dialogue between the tangible and the invisible, between presence and evanescence. A French-born photographer, she first made her mark in the worlds of fashion and beauty, collaborating with major houses and creating campaigns that bear her singular signature: a balance between strength and fragility, mystery and radiance. Now based in Montreal after living in Paris and New York, she is turning toward contemporary art, where her gaze on femininity becomes more introspective, more open to interpretation. While fashion taught her how to compose with light and orchestrate an image, it is in artistic exploration that she now finds a new kind of freedom—a language in which each photograph is a fragment of a suspended story. Her work does not aim to capture a fixed essence of femininity, but rather to reveal its fluidity, its multiplicity, and the tensions that run through it. Her portraits evoke figures in transformation, fragmented identities, and moments where the intimate and the theatrical overlap. Influenced by contemporary dance, poetry, and the Feminine as much as by contemporary photography, Sandrine Castellan draws on subtle references that enrich her compositions. Shadow and light become narrative forces, shaping dreamlike atmospheres where every detail matters. Her subjects, often captured in poses that hover between surrender and control, appear poised on the threshold of revelation— suspended in a space that belongs as much to dreams as to reality. Her photographic approach is grounded in a constant tension between control and letting go. Working both in studio settings and in natural or architectural environments, she seeks to create a dynamic where the image emerges from exchange—a moment of shared vulnerability. Each series thus becomes an exploration, an attempt to grasp the ungraspable.

E F F E R V E S C E N C E
For her very first contemporary art exhibition, Sandrine Castellan unveils Effervescence: a body of photographic work in which fifteen years of vision, research, and intimacy with the feminine figure are crystallized. The title evokes a state that is both contained and in motion: a vibration, an inner tension, a presence ready to emerge without ever becoming fixed. This poetic, sensorial, and quietly unsettling effervescence is what Castellan captures and unfolds in her images. The artist invites us into a world where sensuality does not reveal itself outright, but rather suggests itself, hinted at through a pose, a gaze, a blur, a glimmer of light. In her compositions, femininity is neither essentialized nor objectified; it is plural, shifting, imbued with mystery and softness. Each photograph acts as a threshold—a point of entry into a larger space, at once interior and collective, where beauty and ambiguity, desire and silence intertwine. Effervescence is an invitation to slow down. To observe without trying to resolve. To accept the image as an open, moving, fertile space. Here, we encounter bodies and faces in delicate balance, suspended in an in-between, between offering and withdrawal, strength and surrender. Scenes that are at times intimate, at times nearly mythological, where the feminine is considered both presence and trace, gesture and absence. With this first solo exhibition, Sandrine Castellan asserts an artistic voice that is deeply personal yet universally felt. Effervescence is not a retrospective, but a birth. The emergence of a gaze that chooses poetry over declaration, ambiguity over clarity—and that opens, within the photographic field, a rare space: one of murmur, shimmer, and latent beauty.

Experience E F F E R V E S C E N C E exclusively at Maison Keï Akai.