User:Louis5oaks/Karel Fonteyne

Karel Fonteyne is a Belgian photographer who was born in Koningshof (Antwerp) in 1950.

The wide age gap between him and his brother and sister meant that his childhood was rather solitary. He spent a lot of quality time in the outdoors which he adored, particularly the woods.

He sensed that there was another dimension beyond the one we know, a parallele world that can not be proved. Later on he discovers his kinship with esotericism

His innate sensitivity to his surroundings, to their special vibrations and their immaterial and untouchable dimensions grows further. He is affected by the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, the miraculous.

This personality trait is the background to all his photographic work.

After studying fine arts at the SISA in Antwerp, Karel Fonteyne went on to start a career in art photography. He was soon spotted at an exhibition at the Beaux Arts in Brussels and at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp.

From 1980 he moved to Italy and was propelled into a 17-year career in fashion photography. Thereafter, he travelled the world with this profession. Indeed, Karel Fonteyne did not give up on his ideas and was given “carte blanche” to imagine and devise campaigns for luxury perfume and fashion brands as he wished. Notably, for the magazine Vogue France, he managed to make fashion transcend conformity and to step into another universe, ranging from the most fantastic imagination to the most dramatic realism, and yet often with a touch of humour. He arouses enthusiasm and controversy, but never indifference.

He collaborated with Martin Margiela, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter, Dries Van Noten, Marina Yee,, and Dirk Van Saene.

In 1994 he decided to finish with this hectic but stimulating life to return to his art photography work. Karel Fonteyn has since lived and worked between Mechelen and Minorca.

His Work
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. This is the result of an interpretation of time which for Karel Fonteyne “does not exist”. Time is extended, overstretched.

In the same image one senses and one sees the ‘before’ and the ‘after’. One witnesses various concomitant moments, one duplicates, to the extent of sometimes experiencing a veritable disembodiment.

It is tempting to say that time - the third dimension - is to Fonteyne’s photography what the 4th dimension was to the famous US sci-fi series in the early 1960s : a window open to a magical and disturbing world, sometimes worrying, always aesthetic.

Karel Fonteyne 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. This clearly shows in the series called Pistoleros, in which Fonteyne gathers brushwood and even elements from a dove’s nest to display them like pointing weapons.

He explores an inner universe, that of an artist course, but maybe above all that of the spectator. The works “Tales of Silence” inspire reflection and introspection. Indeed, silence and reflection are intricately linked as they are pulled magnetically to each other. And yet the set up, is immersed in a heavy silence, emphasised by his peculiar treatment of time. For indeed here time stops, is frozen and one does not know if one is witnessing an instant or an eternity. He iwants to reflect an idea, a vision of a state of mind rather than a purely pictorial subject. The whole idea is suggested by strong elements and symbols (writing, bread, still life) but above all by the constant dual approach of reality: the living versus the inanimate, visible versus faded, dressed versus naked, solid versus fragile, experience versus dream.

The result is troubling, strange, and naturally leads to questioning. In the end, and a bit to his surprise, the spectator discovers his own inerpretation. This is indeed the permanent and predominant background of Karel Fonteyne’s work : a questioning of the world we live in, with its numerous unexplained and inexplicable zones.

These strange and mysterious atmospheres also wake up our own mystical tendencies. Faced with the inexplicable, the miraculous, the magic, we each respond with our own personal convictions. Both atheism and religion are intuitive beliefs to cope with our permanent uncertainty : why do we die? What lies beyond (or even before) our life?

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.