Fabrice Langlade: Snark

“The Hypnotic Eye”, an art project and artist selection by Kitt Donà dalle Rose, opens the doors of the magnificent Venetian Palazzo Contarini dalla Porta di Ferro with its inaugural solo exhibition, dedicated to French artist Fabrice Langlade.

“Snark” is the name that Jack London, master of adventure, chose for his last sailboat, his dreamed voyage, the vessel of his freedom. In Langlade’s words, “Snark” “is to the surface of the world what the underground mycorrhizal networks are to the forest, the moving fabric of the floating world”.

Langlade imagines no world without ships. “Snark” is to the surface of the world what the underground mushrooms roots are to the forest; ships, in his vision, are the moving fabric of the floating world. Just as basalt is a solidified liquid, ships are exemplary symbols of vehicular exchange by which all things are made magnificent as they are terrible, peaceful as they are warmongering, coming to destroy and pollinate.

Ships are children’s games, agents of nightmares and utopia, spirits of adventure, conquest and lucre, still human in some way. Those seen floating in “Snark” do not merely receive light, they produce it when night falls. At dusk, at bedtime, the very same children who designed the battlefield leave the ships to their own lives.

Langlade brings to Venice an armada emerging from the shadows of a vast hall, an archipelago of oriental perfumes and fermented exhalation of the marshes, always dual, like ourselves.

Kitt considers Fabrice Langlade one of those rare artists who has kept hold of his vision. Regarding his art, she says: “his work is substantial and not merely a reflection of a popular conformity that craves to find its own ego in the exhibition, Fabrice is not merely a medium, he is a creator in the fullest mastership of his Art”.

The Hypnotic Eye
The Hypnotic Eye is Kitt’s selection of visual artists musicians, filmmakers and performers that started in the ’90 atelier scenes of the US and Paris, featuring Eric Bathory, Philippe Berson, Shazzula Nebula and a sharp mix of purposefully obscure beatnicks. It draws inspiration from Nicolò Donà dalle Rose’s own collections of 1960s artists and friends such as Cy Twombly, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa and Pino Pascali, as well as from the lightheartedness and camp spirit of Kitt’s cinema heroes: Corman, Hershell Gordon and Hammer’s teen-exploitation movies from the 1960s. For the first time in Venice, beyond art, “The Hypnotic Eye” is, in Kitt’ s own words, a trip; a thrill you feel and see, a selection of artists who “have it”. Have what? You might ask… that unique alchemy of aesthetics, camp, and a righteous sense of proportions, light, shape and colour to make you leave your skin and levitate in awe. The Hypnotic Eye is an initiatic experience, a disinterested and heartfelt offering to the Gods, a lovely fragment in time to be enjoyed by those in the know.