ABOUT 'SUN ECHO'

Leon Eixenberger’s body of work, ‚Sun Echo‘, is characterized by an aesthetic of touch. At the heart of his practice lies the human defined socially and as a unity of body and soul.

In earlier works of this cycle Eixenberger’s syntax involves the sculpting of conditions in which relationships can emerge. Later these relations work more and more as metaphors that train sensitivities for the quality of the intersubjective. In more recent works the viewer gets involved in and exposed to a sculpted network of relations where as this network is not explored as mechanical system but from the side of sensuality based on the human desire to create and situate within meaningful bonds.

Integrating sites, often through the meaning of their use, these spatial and relational constellations or experiential models appear in urban and non-urban landscapes, transforming their social protocols and perceptions. Ultimately the artist’s works are invitations to a contemplation on the complex experience of touch and ‚the erotic‘, which could be a term for the emancipatory political potential of touch.

Eixenberger thinks touch through the erotic as ‚a question not only of what we do, but as a question of how acutely we can feel in the doing‘(1). It is a conscious decision to live erotically and it refuses disaffection in all vital endeavors. For him the erotic is self-connection, deep knowledge and when not sequestered to the private domain and not feared, a guide, a creative life force, an illumination that is social. ‚To fight the neoliberal state is also to erotically and poetically occupy it.‘(2)

The desire to touch and be touched by the amorous other is always also the desire to touch another world, while a strenuous intention towards non-touching or the dissenting imperative to not touch or be touched can be just as much about touching otherwise. Contact and/or its refusal, gesture toward a theatrical agency, a notion that frequently appears in Eixenberger’s situations as a parameter of the spaces, in which the public constitutes itself.

(1) Audre Lorde in ‚Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power‘
(2) Hypatia Vourloumis in ‚Ten Theses on Touch, or, Writing Touch‘