"Another empty room" , by Erik Pevernagie, 80 x 100 cm, Oil on canvas

When the rusty shackles of our emotions are unchained, we can become lovers without a cause, and intrinsically the deepest wells of our unconsciousness may uncover the uncharted territories of deliverance, granting free rein to our intuition and giving love downright carte blanche.

Falling in love is like entering a promised land that offers hope and dreams. It is experienced like a room filled with idyllic ecstasy and extreme comprehensiveness, putting everything in the shade.

Love has the power to create a unique room of brightness and richness in the lives of people. Happiness may have a temporary mood, though. A daily routine may kill endearing or passionate memories. The constraint of the room may become oppressive, and the emptiness unbearable. The room loses then its original fullness and turns into a place of nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre has been highly aware of this void.

When fiction has become a reality, it can be a fairy tale or a firestorm. In that case, the time has come to pull up our socks, to question our lives, and to realign matters.

When love has become a play of squirming mind-games or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset.

For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or just a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism, and dim deficiency in empathy.

It is so simple and easy to hate but so demanding and exhausting to love when the vow "love forever" has crumbled down to an avowal of "love never, ever again." When the bonds of trust have been blasted, a way back to a lost paradise is most unlikely.

Stefan Zweig has experienced the oppression of the emptiness of the room: "Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."

Kafka reveals his feelings to Milena : "Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash, and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. ...sometimes even both are behind the doors, and the beautiful "room is empty."

Phenomenon: Quality of relationship

''Factual starting point: Room with man and woman embracing