"Yellow"

pigment-based inkjet print, ink, pastels on Japanese tissue paper

signed and dated on verso

The analysis of the change or transformation of matter and states - as from movement to standstill, from appearance to disappearance – is an important theme in Walde's work. “Yellow” comes from the series Enactments, photomontages with drawn figures. Mysterious parallel worlds are playfully integrated into photographic depictions of everyday events or real situations. The slightly shifted view of a real urban space is enigmatic in the work Yellow by the drwan in oversized figure of a hooded man with a bundle of brushwood at a crosswalk. Strangely lost, present and absent at the same time, he stands in a field of tension between inactivity and possible action. "It is one of those nobodies who appear out of banal everyday life, whose stories are usually lost or [...] can set in motion artistic processes of independent transformation. (Anneliese Pohlen, Martin Walde, Die lange Geschichte der Enactments). Whether and what happens remains open to speculation. Time stands still. An irritating standstill raising existential questions. By immersing the man's surroundings in a supernatural yellow - a stylistic device of Walde's, who thus withdraws the figures from physical reality - as well as the shifted proportions of space and figure, a fantastic poetic constellation is created, which considerably irritates our fixed perception of order, reality, time and space.
(Petra Noll, 2013)

Enactment is a term from communication theory and describes the process by which a certain reality is socially constructed. In this way, structures and incidents that make up an organization are first created through action. Enactment was described as early as 1928 by William Isaac Thomas: "When people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." The creation of reality through enactment can be illustrated by the example of a mime. His actions suggest invisible objects. The mime makes this clear through his actions by behaving as if the object were present. Thus, he will lean on the apparent object, circling it. An observer:in does not see an object, but infers its existence from the mime's behavior. One could also say the object exists as long as the mime behaves as if the object were real.
(wikipedia)