Something similar to the intention behind the painting Two Adolescent Siblings or Brother and Sister (IV) characterizes this work as well. The crisis of values that currently weighs upon Western society, and the multifarious attacks on the institution of the family in our time, provide the medium or context from which this painting was born. The painter gives visual form to the theme in The Engagement by stressing the rationality and natural order that must be respected for this act and those derived from it to be truly worthy of mankind. But, more than a mood of contrived and cloying fantasy –so abundant in the cinema and in romance literature–, we find here a restrained expression of the theme, in which the conceptual prevails over the sensorial, and the principal action shown is the exercise of discernment.
“Experience teaches us that love does not at all mean looking at each other, but to both be looking in the same direction. There are no companions if they are not united in the same task, if they are not climbing together toward the same peak” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
