Roma 2 (2026) — She Rides Into Her Own Light
After midnight Rome changes owners. The tour groups are gone, the restaurants have folded their tables away, and the city is handed over to the people who actually live in it — which in Rome means, overwhelmingly, to scooters. You hear one before you see it: a two-stroke rasp bouncing off six hundred years of stonework, then headlamp light swinging across a wall, then nothing.
Roma 2 is that sound, painted.
A condition, not a story
The whole canvas is built on one collision of light. Everything behind the rider is night: a deep, brushed cobalt laid down in broad strokes and left restless, with the ghost of a façade drawn into it in red oil stick — scaffolding, shutters, the endless armature of a city permanently under repair. Everything to the right is lamplight: a broad, hot cadmium field pouring in from a source outside the frame. And out of the front of the scooter, four white beams cut left across the blue, headlong, into a street the painting refuses to show us.
The hour when nobody is watching
She rides into her own light. Her face is lifted and turned, lit cold blue-white against the dark, eyes level, mouth closed — not the performed cool of the daylight canvas but something more private, the expression people wear when they believe nobody is watching them at all. In a picture with this much colour violence, she is the still point: red jacket, white shirt, dark blue legs, both hands down on the bars, going somewhere at an hour when nobody goes anywhere for anyone else's benefit.
The city gets to be beautiful at night without being observed. Once in a while somebody sees it anyway.
Coarse ground first, the oil stick on top
Like the other works of the 2026 series, the picture is built in two separate moves. The ground comes first, in coarse, broad brushstrokes that settle nothing precisely — the blue night, the lamplit gold, the jacket and the road. The reference points are the German Expressionists, who found in artificial light a licence to abandon local colour altogether: streets could be green, faces blue, skies any colour the feeling required.
Only then does the oil stick arrive, laid on top of that painted ground and carrying the whole drawn layer: the red scaffolding lines scratched into the dark, the black contour of the scooter and the rider's hands, the loose circles of the wheels, the signature in red at the lower right. Freedom below, precision above, and no scraping back — the image is built forward, like every figurative work in this series.
The first nocturne of the series
Night subjects are rare in high-key expressive painting for a simple reason: darkness usually kills colour. Here it does the opposite. The blue makes the red burn, the cadmium makes the blue deepen, and the four white beams give the whole surface a direction of travel. Roma 2 is the dark half of a pair — Roma 1 is the same city by day — and the first work in which this series builds a picture entirely out of artificial light. Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the architect's instinct for structure underneath it: the canvas divided cleanly into a blue two-thirds and a gold third, the beams driving the eye left, the rider's red jacket set exactly on the seam between the two.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Roma 2 is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The coarse brushwork, the scratched red lines, the beams dragged broad across the blue — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body working fast in front of a canvas nearly two metres wide.
Roma 2, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 130 × 180 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.
This painting belongs to Claus Bertermann’s 2026 figurative series — large-format works in acrylic and oil stick in which the drawn layer always lies on top of the paint, never in it.