Dasha Shishkin and Alejandro Leonhardt at Florit/Florit, Palma de Mallorca

In a system isolated from the outside world, entropy (disorder) tends to increase. This is an irreversible process: nothing returns to its original state on its own.

Living beings, by contrast, sustain their internal order through exchanges with their surroundings, at the cost of releasing disorder into them. Alejandro Leonhardt and Dasha Shishkin work with these two forces of life: he contains, reassembling the fragments of a past collapse; she overflows, allowing energy to circulate between bodies that affect one another and blur together.

As we enter, an office shelving unit laden with red security boxes cuts across the room, restricting access to a passageway. Among these shelves and other remnants of an old bank recovered by Leonhardt, Shishkin’s characters introduce a human vibration: repeating profiles, accumulating faces. The two presences coexist in apparent harmony until, on the first floor, each claims its own territory.

Leonhardt has devoted his residency at Florit/Florit to what remained of a branch of Banco Pastor, a bank that disappeared in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. A vault is the perfect fantasy of an isolated system: nothing enters, nothing leaves, and everything seems immutable. A sign still announces that the door cannot be opened until the preset time. Boxes, doors and grilles have lost their function, but not the memory of what they once were.

The artist does not recreate a bank. Working with objects that have already undergone an irreversible process, he configures a new system. A collapse that has already occurred is held in suspension.

With a playful gesture, he places coins in precarious balance, on the edge of a precipice. These small fissures keep the tension alive in a still space and introduce a note of irony: all that protective architecture to safeguard so little value.

In Shishkin’s work, the fissure appears where forms lose their boundaries. Her figures multiply and become entangled, pressing towards the edges. Bodies appear open and in transformation: a hand can have eyes; a body part can claim a story of its own. A single figure can thus contain several characters, voices or desires. From this excess emerges the grotesque: a carnal energy that overflows the body and subverts systems of order. Intimate gestures, such as caressing or breastfeeding, become unsettling, mingling attraction with discomfort.

Shishkin compulsively places cigarettes in a figure’s armpit, in an animal’s snout, anywhere they should not be. Each is a small point of combustion within the scene.

At the end of a corridor, an orange cat, the only apparently normal figure, watches everything from a distance while calmly smoking a finger.

Nothing can undo the irreversible, and the fear of breakdown drives us to seal ourselves off, like a vault. Leonhardt and Shishkin do the opposite, releasing disorder back into the world. A coin on the edge of a precipice, a proliferation of cigarettes. Absurd gestures that resolve nothing and yet are enough to keep building with the pieces that remain.

—Madi Canals