Cognitive restraints in art-therapeutic setting’s experienceand restraints in Barney’s DR

In our essay on Drawing Restraint we have chosen to start from the art-therapeutic setting’s experience: that is to say, suitably equipped places used in rehabilitation therapy of subjects affected by psychical diseases and cognitive retardations. In these rehabilitation environments, specific tools and equipment are employed to develop an aid to cope with cognitive restraints. We end with the therapeutic activity leading to a final product, that is the sensible evidence of the interaction between patient, setting, equipment and relationship with the therapist.

Starting from this practice we analyzed Drawing Restraint series in which Barney decides to restraint his creative process by means of self-imposed restrictions. In art-therapeutic setting there is an organization of the environment by means of specific affective-relational therapeutic intervention, whereas in Barney’s work this process of structuring is functional to his operational criteria.

In the following, we briefly introduce art-therapeutic setting’s experience by showing some cases of patients and their creative works, then we are going to find out in Drawing Restraint a connection in terms of restraints/structure and expressive means. In the end we’d like to put some questions that seem unavoidable when considering linguistic transformations in Drawing Restraint (from DR1 to DR16).

To sum up:

There seems to be a strict relation between what might be called the imposition of material/situational restraints and the increase of expressive possibilities (DR1). At a certain stage of your work, it seems that the idea of 'restraint' has become more metaphorical (rather than simply concerning the material conditions of the artistic gesture - e.g. in DR9). What is then the relation between such metaphorical restraints and expressive possibilities? What kind of effect such a process of 'metaphorization' does have on expressive possibilities? Have you discovered that in the end their relation is not so strict?

(Francesca, Christian, Alessandra, Davide, Raffaella, Alessandro)