Mattias Veldkamp

Mattias Veldkamp is 31 and makes his living hanging paintings worth more than he will ever earn. Born in Dordrecht, the son of a longshoreman and a supermarket cashier, he left technical school at 18 and joined an art shipping company as a helper, where he learned to pack, carry and install without leaving a mark. Today he is the firm's trusted installer and speaks warehouse slang, fast, with eyes lowered.

He lives in a small apartment above a bicycle shop, near the port, and spends most days at the shipping company's warehouse, among wooden crates stacked to the ceiling, rolls of bubble wrap, pallets and a tool bench where each drill bit has its place. On breaks he drinks thermos coffee with colleagues and listens to the radio loud. He likes the smell of wood and foam, which he finds clean.

He is thin, with long arms, fair skin flushed at the cheeks, brown hair shaved at the sides with a short quiff, and sparse unshaven stubble. He wears a small hoop earring in his left ear, the shipping company's black quilted vest over a gray sweatshirt and a cordless drill hanging from his belt, the tool he likes best. He is friendly and teasing and makes light of curators.

About the exhibition, he says he hung a hundred and fifty works in two weeks, each on a security hook with a lock, and then stayed on call in case one tilted. Of the curator, he says he orders everything and carries nothing, and that the night before he stayed late in the building, with the lights off, as the cleaning staff remarked. He asks what he was doing in there, and whether anyone has asked.

Mattias knows the installer who hung every painting is the one who best knows how to take one down. When the detective says he left the door open and came back at dawn, he twirls the earring's hoop with a finger and answers that he hangs paintings and doesn't steal, and that he will only speak in front of the shipping company's lawyer. The rebellion of a worker treated as a thief, or slang covering what he knows: the hoop turns without saying.