Elsewhere (2026) — Present in Body, Absent in Attention
She is fully in the room — and somehow not in it at all. The seated figure in Elsewhere holds the canvas with her whole weight: wrapped in black, legs folded close, one hand resting on her knee. But her gaze has dropped away, turned toward something outside the frame, somewhere the viewer cannot follow. The painting tells no story. It presents a condition — the quiet displacement of being physically present while one's attention lives elsewhere.
A condition, not a narrative
Cool mint greens, teal and pale ivory carry the space around her; the warm, earthy tones of her skin and the ground beneath her are the only heat in the picture. Anatomy is deliberately simplified, slightly distorted — emotional weight matters more here than correctness. Nothing in the composition explains who she is or what she waits for. That is the point: Elsewhere is less a portrait than a state of being made visible.
Painted with a roller, drawn with an oil stick
For his figurative works, Claus Bertermann deliberately changes his physical process. The acrylic ground is applied not with brushes but with a paint roller — a tool that forces broader arm movements and reduces fine control. The result is a raw, uneven field that keeps the momentum of the body visible inside the surface.
The figure's silhouette is then drawn directly with oil stick — intuitively, and independently of the painted ground. The lines do not follow the surface underneath; they cut through it. This separation between rough painterly field and assertive drawing is where the painting gets its tension: structure on one side, vulnerability on the other.
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. Elsewhere is built the opposite way: forward only. Coarse acrylic first, decisive oil stick contours on top. Nothing is taken back; every move stays.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Elsewhere is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The marks of the roller, the breaks in the oil stick 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 a two-metre canvas.
Elsewhere, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 200 × 180 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.