Paper Plane

source: facebook

Karel Fonteyne heeft een opmerkelijk en sterk persoonlijk oeuvre opgebouwd met vooral zwartwit werk. Fonteyne is nooit een ‘snelle’ fotograaf geweest: zijn foto’s zijn uiterst bewerkelijk, niets is wat het op het eerste gezicht lijkt. Voor ‘Tales of Silence’ heeft hij voor het eerst volledig in kleur gewerkt. Maar er zitten haast geen primaire kleuren in, wel bruinen, grijzen, groenen…, telkens in een specifieke sfeer.
Die bewerkelijkheid, dat kleurgebruik, de onderwerpen: je zou Fonteyne een schilderend fotograaf kunnen noemen. Zoals hij in 1991 de reeks ‘The Painter’ maakte, waarop een schilder zijn eigen schaduw lijkt te bewerken, zo gaat Fonteyne in het hele fotografische proces om met alle mogelijke details, om telkens een unieke compositie te creëren. Elke compositie is onverwacht: Fonteyne gaat alle vanzelfsprekendheid, elk inlossen van een banale verwachting uit de weg.
In deze reeks ‘Tales of Silence’ zitten nogal wat vrouwen – soms een man – die elk op hun manier zichzelf gedeeltelijk lijken te verbergen, om de aandacht op iets ‘anders’ te trekken. Maar dat andere ontvouwt zich (net) niet, het lijkt de stilte voor de storm.
Sprookjes van stilte zijn het, en zoals het authentieke sprookjes betaamt: er schuilt een dreiging in, een vervreemding, soms zelfs een kwetsuur. Een foto van Karel Fonteyne is nooit gratuit of opportunistisch, maar altijd geladen en precieus gecomponeerd.
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source: brusselstimes

“I usually don’t photograph what I see but rather what my mind reflects.”
Karel Fonteyne is a Belgian photographer based in Brussels. Since the 70’s, he has built a very personal body of work using primarily analog black-white work. His career spans almost 45 years of photographic work and includes many vintage prints published in small editions.

Unlike most photographers, Karel does not take pictures from the outside world. His photographs are extremely intricate and nothing is what it seems at first. He composes and translates his thoughts and feelings into very personal images. In order to achieve this, he identifies elements which at first sight have nothing in common. Thanks to the “painturesque” style and language, the images tell stories, and they do so quietly. And although they are very present, they force the spectator into silence.

It makes the woman mysterious, recessed in their own world. They all appear to partly conceal themselves, each one in their own way, in order to divert attention to something else. It is like the silence before the storm. At first glance they look beautiful and strong, but soon you feel the vulnerable, sensitive undertone.

Nails in a loaf of bread, a saw or smeared lipstick makes all this painfully obvious. In addition, the characters seem to be alone in the world, making them more strongly connected with “a bigger whole”. Karel’s images thereby take us out of our comfort zone and force us to reflect whether we like it or not.
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source: karelfonteyne

The fingerprint of a child’s soul is the emotional imprint of his early reactions on impressions and experiences.
We are who we were.

“As a young boy I used to wonder through the twilight of the woods, strange feelings slipped into my veins as the universe made me a witness of what one can’t tell nor describe.
I loved to build small camps with branches and cover them with dried gras,sitting inside gave me a very strong attachment to nature:
Sounds,smels and movement covered me with a coat of inner silence and frozen motion it was like entering another dimension, cuddling loneliness.
He started to read ,especialy the South american writers like Jorge Luis Borges,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Adolfo Bio Casares,Octavio Paz,Ruben Fonseca,Julio Corthazar etc.. as they were very connected to his way of thinking.
More attracted by the inner than the outside world, and after having seen movies from Bergman, Fellini and in particular ‘Fuglane’ by Terjei Vesaas which impressed himby the incredible pictorial description of the inner lives of the three persons and the nature surrounding them, he started to photograph.
The ingredients of his photographs are quite dark:the unknown lonelines and the mysteries of the live-puzzle are never far away, he likes to combine things who have nothing in common and gives them an unexpected meaning and direction.
“I usualy don’t photograph what I see but how my mind reflects it”.
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source: karelfonteyne

Karel Fonteyne is an isolated case
We call these artists in the art world Einzelgänger
or sometimes Abseitigen.He is indeed an Abeitige.
A lonesome always searching finder.
He is not the maker of the nice card,no,the time stands still in his work.
The deep secret of what I could almost call random mastery lies in its self explored loneliness,in the flair at the discovering of all the forms
of loneliness.
He lives and works in a world that only he inhabits.
He feel save when he dreams.

It is a cold world full of dilapidation,they are rooms where he plays on a small stage,a macabre game with people and things,full of puzzles and secrets.
He alone holds the key to the lock of alienation and contemporary anxiety.
His world is not an underworld but an in-between world,where live and death live static together on the border of the non-existence.
In Karel’s work a reality is created in the reality,a kind of infra realism,a screaming silence enveloped by invisible glass,a fragility without violence,a dream whose content you have already long forgotten.
He photographs the live you’ve already left.
The things that are no longer visible.
His work testifies of a surreptitious towing beauty.