I Am Who I Was (1968 -1981)
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.
Paul Snoek, Poet, 1976
Technic: Piezography is the highest-quality, and most-archival, digital black and white ink printing system. Scanned black and white negatifs inkjet printed. Papersize 40 x 50 cm print 39,5 x 26,5 cm. Ed5
Artistproofs, printed on Kentmere art Classic barite paper.