La Sentinelle (2026) — The Guardian Who Watches You
A woman sits before a landscape worth guarding: green terraces, blue mountains, a tree in full blossom. She is richly adorned and utterly calm, and everything about her says sentinel. But a sentinel never faces the treasure — she faces the direction the danger comes from. The land lies at her back. Her eyes are fixed on you. La Sentinelle is the portrait that reverses the roles: we came to look, and find ourselves the ones being inspected.
A guardian, not a story
The painting tells no story. It presents a condition: authority at rest. What exactly she protects — the valley behind her, a memory, a border only she can see — the picture flatly refuses to say, and that withheld secret is its engine. The second glance rewards patience: her face is split into two colour zones, pale daylight on one side, deep turquoise shadow on the other, as if she held the day watch and the night watch at once. Her hands, folded in her lap, are empty. She carries no weapon; her authority is the weapon.
Wet-in-wet — with the oil stick returning
Like the other works of the 2026 series, the entire field is painted wet-in-wet with large brushes — figure, costume, hills and sky laid down while the paint is still live, so each colour bleeds into the next and the boundaries dissolve. The reference points are the German Expressionists: bent perspective, heightened, emotionally charged colour, a surface that keeps moving.
But La Sentinelle adds something the series has not seen before. The oil stick — the drawing tool of Bertermann's earlier figurative works — returns in a single, precise role: the golden lines of the earrings and the lace gloves, drawn directly on top of the merged acrylic ground. Freedom below, precision above. The jewellery glints against the wet field exactly the way real gold glints against skin.
The first portrait of the new series
The 2026 series began with village scenes and landscapes. La Sentinelle widens its territory to the oldest of painterly genres — the seated portrait — and lets the tradition of the commanding sitter collide with a thoroughly contemporary palette. Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the architect's instinct for structure underneath the riot of colour: the figure holds her ground, the landscape recedes in ordered planes, the chair frames her like a throne.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, La Sentinelle is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The merged colours, the two-toned face, the drawn gold sitting proud of the wet surface — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body working fast in front of a two-metre canvas.
La Sentinelle, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 210 × 160 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.