Le 55 (2026) — Seen by Everyone, Seen by No One
The hands are folded, the gaze is fixed — and it is not meeting anyone in the room. The foreground figure of Le 55 sits with his chin on clasped fingers, a crown of swirling curls above an introspective face, while a second figure in translucent yellow lingers at his shoulder, almost like a projection, a memory, or a reflection. A cocktail glass with a slice of citrus stands at the lower right. The setting is social; the picture is not.
Who is truly being seen?
The painting was inspired by direct observations at Le 55, the legendary beach club near Saint-Tropez — an environment built around visibility, effortless elegance and social performance. What interested Claus Bertermann was not the famous club itself, and not the individuals in it, but the contradiction that unfolds there: people gathered together, yet emotionally distant; apparent indifference next to the universal desire to be seen. The two figures occupy the same social space and remain psychologically separate. The painting tells no story. It asks a simple question instead: in environments built around visibility, who is truly being seen?
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 luminous green ground of Le 55 still carries the direction of every pass.
The figures are 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. The face of the foreground figure breaks into angular planes of saturated blues, greens, violets, oranges and reds, held together by bold contour lines. 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. Le 55 is built the opposite way: forward only. Coarse acrylic first, decisive oil stick contours on top. Nothing is taken back; every move stays — including the small cocktail glass that references the social setting without ever becoming illustrative.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Le 55 is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The roller marks in the green ground, 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 the canvas.
Le 55, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 130 × 180 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.