Karel Fonteyne has built a remarkable and strong personal oeuvre, chiefly with black/white work. Fonteyne was never a ‘quick’ photographer: 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 colours, it does contain shades of brown, grey, green, every time in a specific atmosphere... …,

The intricacy, the use of colours, the subjects: you could call Fonteyne a painting photographer. Like ‘The Painter’ series he made in 1991 where a painter seems to be editing his own shadow. This is how Fonteyne treats all possible details in the whole photographic process in order to create a unique composition every time. Every composition is unexpected: Fonteyne avoids every self-evidence, every fulfilment of a banal expectation.

This ‘Tales of Silence’ series contains many women – sometimes a man –who each in their own way seem to partly conceal themselves, to divert attention to something ‘else’. But it does not unfold (just), it is like the silence before the storm.
They are fairy tales of silence, and as befits authentic fairy tales: there is a threat, an alienation, sometimes even an injury. A Karel Fonteyne photograph is never gratuitous or opportunistic, but always charged and precisely composed.