Karel Fonteyne has built a remarkable and strong personal oeuvre, chiefly with black/white work. Fonteyne was never a ‘quick’ photographer: his photographs are extremely intricate, nothing is what it seems at first. It contains hardly any primary colours, it does contain shades of brown, grey, green, every time in a specific atmosphere…
The intricacy, the use of colours, the subjects: you could call Fonteyne a painting photographer.He makes only unique prints ,no editions.
This is how Fonteyne treats all possible details in the whole photographic process in order to create every time a unique composition.
Every composition is unexpected: he avoids every self-evidence, every fulfilment of a banal expectation.
The woman and men who each in their own way seem to partly conceal themselves, divert attention to something ‘else’. But it just doesn’t unfold, it is like the silence before the storm.
They are fairy tales of silence, and as befits authentic fairy tales: there is a threat, an alienation, sometimes even an injury. A Karel Fonteyne photograph is never gratuitous or opportunistic, but always charged and precisely composed.
Marc Ruyters, August 2014
EXHIBITION
Tales of Silence
Karel Fonteyne
September 11th – october 25th
Ingrid Deuss Gallery
Provinciestraat 11
2018 Antwerp
Belgium
http://www.ingriddeussgallery.com
http://www.karelfonteyne.com
