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A man and a woman are sitting opposite each other. Silent and stiff, four hands resting on the table. They stare, do not look. There is nothing more to share, nothing more to say. Love is extinguished. Only the lamp above the table spreads its warm rays of light in tangible strips across the tabletop.

It is an explanation, an idea. However, it is not certain that Theo van der Nahmer's relief at the Eneco substation in Tomatenstraat represents a cooled relationship. For although the imagery, in which symmetry and geometry play an important role, evokes a chilly atmosphere, the depiction could also have another (more positive) meaning. Van der Nahmer's stone sculptures were, in fact, generally conceived as somewhat static, regardless of the subject. In this relief, the sculptor sought to enliven it by working out the surface in great detail. The stone has been worked with many small scratches.

It must be an early work by Van der Nahmer. At the beginning of his career, immediately after the Second World War and in the 1950s, the sculptor still worked a lot in stone. But it became too expensive for him. He started modelling in wax. He cast the models in bronze. The wax gave him much more artistic and expressive freedom than stone.

It is not known exactly when Van der Nahmer made his stone relief. Although we cannot assume that the building and the work of art were completed at the same time (after the war, the integration of sculpture and architecture was no longer self-evident), the year in which the substation was built can provide clarity. It was completed in 1948.