Tales of Silence (2014-2018)

Karel Fonteyne has build a remarkable and strong personal oeuvre, chiefly with black and white work.His photographs are extremely intricate, nothing is what it seems at first.Tales of Silence is his first project in full colour.It contains hardly any primary colors in it, just brown, grey, green, every time in a specific atmosphere.

The intricacy, the use of color, the subjects, you could call Fonteyne a painting photographer. Just as he made the series 'The Painter' in 1991, in which a painter appears to edit his own shadow, Fonteyne deals with all possible details throughout the photographic process, in order to create a unique composition each time. Every composition is unexpected: Fonteyne avoids any obviousness, any fulfillment of a banal expectation.

This Tales of Silence series feature quite a few women - sometimes a man - who each in their own way seem to partially hide themselves in order to draw attention to something 'else'. But the other thing doesn't (just) unfold, it seems like the calm before the storm.

They are fairy tales of silence, and as benefits authentic fairy tales: there is a threat in them, an alienation, sometimes even an injury. A photo by Karel Fonteyne is never gratuitous or opportunistic, but always charged and precisely composed.

Marc Ruyters

Technic: Ink jet prints on Hahnemuhle mat rag paper, different sizes. Ed5. All framed in Box