Those who, like us, have been dealing with contemporary art for quite a long time, are probably aware of how every artist, painter, sculptor and visual operator, live their time as if it were marked by a fever, an uncontrollable stress.  
We know that at first stress developed as a concept in the medical field and only later in the psychological one.  
Stress and mental fatigue-related reactions in artists, creators, men of letters, painters and sculptors are the organic outcomes of prolonged or intense fatigue states that one is unable to cope with properly.  
Furthermore, much depends upon the kind of personality one has: on the one hand there is the extroverted personality and on the other the “obsessive” one, the latter being a typical feature of artists, humorous people, fanatics, schizophrenics having a strong emotional sphere and mainly a strong sensitivity that sometimes borders coldness. Many artists magnified emotions, and many of them outlined an obsessive path. Abstract art began on such considerations, and the maniacal repetition of forms, squares, rectangles and circles for example, started from the assumption to stop all motions and impulses. So we have Albers who painted a series of “homage to the square” for all his life and wrote the tones and the kind of colours he used on the back of his paintings; we have Mondrian with his paintings of backgrounds made with the primary colours; we have the American Ad Reinhardt with his paintings that were apparently painted black but that were actually bluish, brown or violet.  
Many artists created their “own style” that is a sign of obsessive mania even in its details, an obsessive run-up not to distort the image given to the public, like Robert Ryman's white canvases.  
To tell the truth, the entire American art of the sixties was based on repetition and on obsession. Minimalism played a key role; Donald Judd's works were perfectionist; Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawings followed precise rules; the French followed a serial pattern, too: Daniel Buren with his “strings” and Daniel Taroni with his blue little squares.  
Still in the sixties Capogrossi's maniacal “forks” and Remo Bianco's tableaux dorées, a sequence of squares and golden rectangles, became rather popular in Italy. The “Accumulations” by Aman, the lively French who was a representative of Nouveau Realism who spread tubes of colours on his canvases, are part of this trend, too.  
Just as interesting are the famous trash sculptures, the obsessive search for parts and waste materials. Fear of life and death can be read behind the repetition of Allan Mc Collum's “Vehicles” that are pastel vases and, actually, cinerary urns.  
It is impossible not to mention the support-works by Felix Gonzales Torres, the artist who died of AIDS who gave a shape to his objects using piles of candies and who asked people to make his work die through little gluttonous thefts.  
This obsessive trend that can still be seen in artistic creations is recent and goes back to the Sixties.  
Just think of the German Hanne Darboven who built diagrams by means of numbers, pentagrams and cards. Important dates, thoughts from diaries, personal details: everything comes to the surface with this obsessive, undulatory, flowing and often unintelligible writing. Speaking of numbers, even the Polish Opalka Roman loved to use them to mark his existence: the progressive numbering used black to make the past grey and a higher percentage of white to underscore the ending year. In this way the artist thought that black would completely disappear and only white would remain at the end of his life.  
It is funny to think how the American On Kawara used art in an obsessive way: at first with telegrams in his works which said that he was alive (1976) and then black paintings on which he put the date in white characters, linking the whole work with the country he was and with the addition of a newspaper.  
Every painting was then put inside a box that included the newspaper: the whole work thus became a cold record of a life that is always dramatic, always different and often the source of anxiety and obsessions. Cold repetition could be seen in Andy Warhol's works, too, with his pop art with the repetition of Marilyn Monroes' face, and in Duane Hanson and Charles Eastes who go from reality to illusion; but even in Piero Manzoni with his lines and his “Artist's shit”.  
The urbanised society gave incredible examples of self-control and one would think that even art resorted to obsession to show its anxiety, its worries, its constraint and repetition.  
Repeating the tastes, repeating the ideas, repeating the works, repeating the signs, the signals, sending feelings and emotions away meant giving space to coldness and to maniacal rituals.