Blitz Liebe (2026) — The Instant the Bolt Lands
Blitz Liebe — Lightning Love — catches two people in the exact instant the bolt lands. Cheek pressed to cheek, four eyes thrown wide open, they stare out of the canvas with the slightly alarmed euphoria of having fallen in love far too quickly and having no intention of slowing down. A single butterfly makes its escape toward the upper corner — the last cliché to leave the building, as if even the proverbial butterflies in the stomach knew to get out before the voltage rose any higher.
A condition, not a narrative
Who struck whom first? Whose hand is resting on whose shoulder? The painting flatly refuses to clarify, and that is precisely the point — Blitz Liebe never bothers with the paperwork. It leaves the viewer suspended in the giddy, faintly absurd suspense of the coup de foudre: thrilling, irreversible, and just a little ridiculous — which is, of course, exactly how it feels. No before, no after; a condition, rendered as a beautiful electrical fault.
Painted with a roller, drawn with an oil pastel
For his figurative works, Claus Bertermann deliberately changes his physical process. The acrylic ground is applied not with brushes but with a roller or an extra-wide brush — tools that force broader arm movements and reduce fine control. In Blitz Liebe this produces a raw, electric field: a vibrating acid-green that carries visible momentum and bodily rhythm before a single face appears.
The figures are then drawn directly with oil pastel — intuitively, and independently of the painted ground. The lines do not conform to the surface beneath them; they cut across it, looping the wide orange-rimmed eyes, the grinning mouths and the restless, white-outlined fingers into existence. Brilliant electric pinks, intense yellows and deep blues erupt across the faces. This separation between rough painterly field and assertive drawing establishes the tension the whole picture runs on: structure against impulse — the very mismatch that powers love at first sight.
Built forward, not scraped back
Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the difference immediately. In the abstracts, layers are applied and scraped back again — the image emerges like sediment, by removal. Blitz Liebe is built the opposite way: forward only. Coarse acrylic application followed by decisive oil-pastel contours — no second-guessing, no undo. Exactly like the moment it depicts.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Blitz Liebe is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The marks of the roller in the acid-green ground, the breaks in the oil-pastel line, the small irregularities of the surface — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body moving in front of the canvas.
Blitz Liebe, 2026. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 160 × 160 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.