Karel Fonteyne

Karel Fonteyne is an isolated case.

We call these artists in the art world Einzelgänger or sometimes Abseitigen.

He is indeed an Abseitige. A lonesome and always searching finder.

He’s not the maker of the ‘nice’ picture—no, 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 air at the discovering of all the forms of loneliness.

He lives and works in a world that only he inhabits.

He feels safe when he dreams.

It’s 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 life and death static live together on the border of the non-existence.

In Karel’s work a reality is created in the reality, a kind of infrarealism, a screaming silence enveloped by invisible glass, a fragility without violence, a dream which content you have already long forgotten.

He photographs the life you’ve already left. The things that are no longer visible.

His work testifies of a surreptitious towing beauty.

― Paul Snoek - Poet & Painter, 1976

“What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.”

―Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

"A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness,"

― Jean Genet

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.”

― Emily Dickinson,The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

― Stefan Zweig,The Burning Secret and other stories

“We must bring

our own light

to the

darkness.”

― Charles Bukowski

“POZZO:

I am blind.

(Silence.)

ESTRAGON:

Perhaps he can see into the future.”

― Samuel Beckett,Waiting for Godot

“I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.”

― Haruki Murakami,The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle