Karel Fonteyne’s work is impossible to label within traditional classifications. Every image is a veritable scene, a novel, a story. Indeed, Karel Fonteyne uses photography in the same way a writer uses words to describe a new world. This world is a troubled one, halfway between the impossible and the real.
He starts off with an intuition which he allows to mature and to develop. He often works and refines his ideas with drawings and sketches in order to develop a composition.
The setup and the execution are relatively quick. Often, it is but at the end of the process that the artist understands the significance of his original intuitive inspiration. He experiences his art as an act of transformation from an unconscious inspiration to a readable work of art.
His abundant work comes in series inspired by daily routine or the news. The composition work and the assembly of the elements are essential to the end result. The images are forceful, the display a subtle contradiction between violence and vulnerability, force and fragility, beauty and horror.
He explores an inner universe, that of an artist course, but maybe above all that of the spectator.
The very essence of things is to be found inside and is never immediately apparent. It can be discovered as an unexpected surprise or rather at the end of a journey, but nothing is ever easy or obvious.
Véronique de Limburg Stirum