Walde's exhibitions and projects are full of stories that lie behind things. These are stories you do not necessarily have to know, but finding out about them sometime takes you on a delightful trip into the depths of this lateral thinker's cosmos, and there are stories you can use yourself to relate to certain objects and installations.
At the same time, in terms of perceiving reality he
rates the subjective element present in this kind of
narrative reporting very highly – reporting that also
has its gaps. His drawings and posters always have
a cinematic quality: he may sometimes produce
whole series, as for Loosing Control, or he
may accommodate a whole sequence of events within
an image, rather like medieval simultaneous presentations
or modern comic strips. Even though the
posters for Enactments and Clips of Slips work with the objectifying resources of film
and photography, Walde more or less reverses the
documentary principle: the disturbing events and
experiences can be grasped and acquire a describable
reality only when Walde works on these images with
a drawing pen, i.e. when he superimposes the intellectual
space of surging memories on photographs
and videos of urban spaces whose clear structure
is merely apparent. This principle of fading pictorial
worlds into each other and blurring them is ultimately
also clear in his installations: Walde mistrusts the
objectifying certainty of documentation to such an
extent that he does not grant a priori truth to films
or photographs, to physical phenomena or chemical
reactions – it is only in the course of radical subjectification,
in working over and transforming by means
of memories, desires, fantasies or individual ideas,
that a valid picture of the world emerges for him.
Recipients follow him through all this with similar
amazement, seeking and fascinatedly wrestling for
order, like visitors to his installation Der Duft der verblühenden Alpenrose [The fragrance of the fading Alpine rose].– Poeticization as analysis. With its slight tendency
towards communicative meaninglessness, towards
pragmatic uselessness, the sentence "The rain is at a pleasant temperature" also carries some mysterious
notes, an emotional directness leading some distance
over the wide field of associations and the subconscious.
Warm rain at a pleasant temperature – that
evokes holiday memories, tunes like "Singing in the
Rain", fantasies of loving exuberance and carefree
days. Despite all the disturbing elements of the
original scene there is a seductive power in this
sentence that appeals to highly individual memories,
a longing for lightness and enticement. Projects like
the Nordhom installation of the same name and
also like NOFF #4 or Shrinking Bottles/ Melting Bottles convey this poeticization ...
(contined on next page >>>)
