Beso (2026): A Kiss the Size of the World
A café bench, a small table, an ordinary afternoon. Then a young man and a young woman lean towards each other, close their eyes and kiss.
The café keeps going around them. For these two, the world has just become very small: exactly the size of one kiss.
A condition, not a story
Beso, the Spanish word for kiss, does not tell how they met or what happens next. It shows the one moment in between: his arm around her shoulders, his hand gently holding her face, two people completely absorbed in each other.
Two faces, almost one
Look closer, and their two faces almost become one. Their closed eyes rest at the same height, their cheeks touch, and their lips meet at the very centre of the canvas. Both of them have their eyes closed. The only one looking at this kiss is you.
Flowers in bloom
Everything about the couple is calm, except for one thing: the flowers in her hair. Bertermann draws them as dozens of small spinning spirals in red, orange, yellow and green, as if they had burst into bloom at the very moment of the kiss. Nothing in the room moves, yet everything has started to bloom.
Freedom below, precision above
The picture is built in two separate moves. First the ground: the glowing green background with its yellow light, the orange-red café bench, the blue clothing of the two figures and the pale edge of the table, laid in with coarse, broad brushstrokes that settle nothing precisely. Then the drawing, on top of that ground: the closed eyes, the red lips, the cheeks, the fine orange line of his hand and the spirals of the flowers in her hair. The line never sinks into the paint; it stays on top. Like every figurative work in this series, the image is built forward, never scraped back — the exact inversion of the abstract series, where surfaces are built over months and cut back into.
Part of a group about couples
Beso joins Orbit, Common Ground and Nocturne in a group of 2026 paintings about couples. Each canvas shows a different moment of closeness: a dance, a shared afternoon, a shared night — and here, a kiss.
An architect's scale
At 150 × 200 cm the two faces are larger than life. Bertermann, who holds a Master's degree in Architecture, uses that scale to put the viewer right at the next table, close enough to feel the warmth of the moment.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Beso is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The spinning flowers, the running colour, the hand drawn around her cheek in a few sure strokes — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human hand working fast in front of a canvas two metres wide.
Beso, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 150 × 200 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.
This painting belongs to Claus Bertermann’s 2026 figurative series — large-format works in acrylic and oil stick in which the drawn layer always lies on top of the paint, never in it.