Who crawls under a table? And is there a body on that hand? Nice strange lockdown art by CA Wertheim

Playground of CA Wertheim in Galerie Cokkie Snoei.Statue Natascha Libbert

Are you just hiding under the coffee table, completely folded, was quite difficult to do. No one sees you, and then the cat will find you again. Got it! Recognizable? No of course not. It’s a terribly weird scene that CA Wertheim painted in oil and sand. Homey, yes, because of the decor. But everything else is strange. Who crawls under a table? And why is that carpet made of sand? And is there really a body on that hand, or does it lead a life of its own, like Thing from the Addams Family?

A body belongs to that hand, gallery owner Cokkie Prune assures me, at least in real life. This is the artist’s hand. Her exhibition in Rotterdam is called I’m not here for a while. Wertheim previously mainly made self-portraits, in all kinds of styles and materials. This painting is called playground and it, like the other paintings in the exhibition, is a lockdown artwork. Wertheim painted her houseplants, her cat and thus her attempts to hide. In another painting, her shoes stick out from under a duvet.

Wertheim isn’t very good at hide-and-seek. But in painting, as this insane composition shows that has not let go of me for days. The layout is wonderfully uncomfortable, with the cat and the hand so high on the painting and then that ugly shiny pink chair in the corner. We look at it diagonally from above, a perspective reminiscent of crime scene photos.

Or do we, spectators, sit in another chair and lean far forward to see what is about to happen? That cat is going to take that hand, but for the time being it is in a strange acrobatic turn. It seems like a fluke, this whole composition, a playfully exciting moment captured in a snapshot. However, it will have been carefully thought through. Painting is slow.

Elspeth Diederix, Still Life Milk (2002)Image Dutch Photo Museum

Photography is sometimes slow too. The tension in Wertheim’s painting and that free hand remind me of a well-known photo by Elspeth Diederix. With her Still life (milk) she won the Prix de Rome in 2002. In that photo you can see her work table in New York. The everyday items are arranged in such a way that they form a circle around a pool of milk with a roll of pink tape in it. Premeditated spontaneity, a staged moment of ‘Oops!’

And then there’s that loose hand at the top left of Diederix. That’s really a free hand, this time: an artificial hand that just lay between the things of the photographer. I have never had that suddenly an artificial hand on my table. Just like I rarely hide under the coffee table à la Wertheim. Fortunately, we have artists for that playful fantasy. Who, even if they don’t leave their house, know how to make something out of it.