The Freud Museum announces a discovery. Leonora Carrington was a surrealist artist known for painting dreamlike, imaginative worlds—and Villa Pilar, painted in 1940 while she was confined to a Spanish psychiatric institution, shows her mind working under extreme duress. The museum calls it “a recently discovered painting made during her confinement.” The press release describes the sanatorium. The catalogue will describe her diagnosis. The wall text will describe her suffering. None of this tells you what the painting shows.
I looked at the image. Villa Pilar is a building plan. Not a landscape of a building — a plan. Walls laid flat. Rooms visible from above. Carrington painted architecture the way architects draw it: as information, not as atmosphere. She painted a floor plan while locked inside a building she could not leave.
Here is what interests me. Carrington was treated with a drug called Cardiazol that induced seizures, used in psychiatric hospitals before electroconvulsive therapy—a procedure that used electrical currents to trigger convulsions as a psychiatric treatment—became standard. The treatment worked by creating convulsions so severe that patients often fractured their spines. Carrington wrote later that she lost the ability to move her jaw, to swallow, to control her hands. And in that state she painted a building as a grid. Horizontal lines, vertical lines, rooms divided by walls you can see through because the view is from above. No perspective. No vanishing point. You are everywhere and nowhere.
Architectural drawings work by removing the viewer’s body. You see the building as if you are not in it. A floor plan is drawn from a position no human being can occupy — overhead, weightless, outside time. Carrington painted that view while her body was being chemically dismantled.
The museum frames this as art made “during confinement.” That is not wrong but it is not precise. Confinement is a locked door. This is a painting of what a building looks like when your body is no longer a reliable way to know where you are. A floor plan is a map for someone who cannot trust their own location.
I design wayfinding systems. I learned early that the sighted world assumes navigation is visual recognition. You see a landmark, you know where you are. But recognition requires memory. Memory requires a continuous self who was there before and is there now. Carrington’s treatment was designed to break continuity. Convulsions, amnesia, the inability to hold a thought across time.
Villa Pilar is not a memory. It is a schematic. You do not need to have been there before to read it.
The Freud Museum, which houses Sigmund Freud’s archives in London, will hang Villa Pilar in June 2024. They will call it a work of trauma. I see something else. A woman who could not trust her body drew a building as if bodies do not matter. That is not trauma. That is a solution.
This article was prompted by Leonora Carrington work painted during psychiatric confinement to go on show for first time from Guardian Art & Design.