leander
Leander’s father was born in 1906. He fled Germany before the war and lived about Europe before settling in Switzerland, where he met Leander’s mother. She was 28 when Leander was born and also loved music. Leander grew up near Luzern, in the shadows of Mount Pilatus. It was the norm there to require children to draw a tree as part of a psychological test required for admission into the first grade. Leander was fascinated by the monkey enclosure in the Zoo which featured a large climbing structure made with dozens of large logs. To him it was the most fascinating form of a tree he’d ever come across. And so for his exam, this is what young Leander decided to draw. The reviewing committee was horrified and made a great fuss about the psychological implications of misinterpreting a tree in children. The villagers felt unsettled by the family’s unconventional way of life and young Leander paid a price. Drawing and art on the other hand were like a rabbit hole for Leander – the kind from Alice in Wonderland. It was something that could not be taken away.
The rabbit hole continued into a blooming career. Today Leander is a docent at a well-known art and design school, an accomplished graphic/book/poster designer, and an artist. Each discipline is not separate from each other – like sparks that fly from one fire to the next, they feed each other. His development as a creative has been primarily sculpted by choosing projects that have meaning to him.
“How beautiful should a poster be if it is about something evil?” Half way through the shoot we shift gears and work together to take down some of his art work and replace it with a recent poster series. Leander screen prints the posters which contain silver to symbolize the metal of bombs dropped by Assad on the people of Syria.
How Leander dresses and grooms himself are in themselves an extremely well executed form of visual communication. He balances understated and fierce in a bold configuration. I ask Leander what masculinity means to him: “For me it’s the freedom to be tender and have it be perceived as strength.” His words of advice are to be very intentional about environments that you choose to be in.
https://www.leandereisenmann.ch/home
[37] June 18, 2021