Rien ne va Plus (2026)
"Rien ne va plus" — no more bets. It is the last thing a roulette croupier says, the phrase that freezes the whole table in the half-second before the wheel decides. Claus Bertermann watched it happen at the casino in Monaco, and painted it three metres wide: five players, one spinning wheel, and the exact instant when it is already too late to change your mind.
A condition, not a narrative
The painting refuses to tell a story. It fixes a condition instead — the moment chance, greed and restraint are all visible at once. The ball is already running. At the far right, one man is still hurling his last chips onto the field, past the call, past reason; the player beside him has caught his arm and is holding him back from the clean, total loss that is one gesture away. Around them, five hats from five different corners of the world make the point quietly: this is Monte-Carlo, the one green table where the whole planet comes to hand its money to the same wheel.
Painted fast, drawn in oil stick
Rien ne va Plus belongs to Bertermann's figurative method, the reverse of his abstract discipline. Broad fields of acrylic are laid down fast and loose — a raw, high-key ground of hot pink, acid green, cobalt and flame-orange that keeps the momentum of the arm visible in the surface.
The figures, the wheel, the chips and the two trays are then drawn straight over that ground in white oil stick. The contour lines stay independent of the paint underneath; they sit on top of it and cut through the colour rather than follow it. That separation — raw painterly field against assertive line — is where the picture gets its charge.
Built forward, not scraped back
Collectors who know the abstract series will feel the difference at once. In the abstracts, layers are applied and scraped back — the image arrives by removal, like sediment. Rien ne va Plus is built the opposite way: forward only. Coarse acrylic first, decisive oil-stick contour on top, and two deadpan jokes left on trays at the table's edge — two Bitcoins on the left, a single fish on the right. In the old language of the game a "fish" is the player the table is quietly counting on, the one who keeps feeding the pot; the Bitcoins are simply the newest chips ever minted. New money, old money, and the oldest bait of all.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Rien ne va Plus is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The breaks in the oil-stick line, the collisions of wet colour, 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 three-metre canvas.
Rien ne va Plus, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 160 × 310 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.