Print : Photogravure   Trapassate (2001) Aquatinta, Carborundum, Photogravure Schneider Bütten | 63x63 cm | Auflage: 5 (each numbered and signed)             Tattoo (1999) Etching, Photogravure 77x60 cm | Edition: 7 (each numbered and signed)                 Poetry of Nudes Walter Ehrismann calls his nudes 'Tattoos'. Graphic structures, angular and at the same time flowing, edged by a perfect circle, pull themselves over the side of the back of a naked female torso, and appear to be carved with colour into the skin. The shapes penetrate into the body and at the same time flow over the rounded body contours. A landscape does the same, it disappears at the edge of the circle, dissolves somewhere into nothing, suggesting a globe. The landscape: the edges of the mountains, the freshness of the meadows, the peace of flowing stretches of water. These mediate between the nakedness of the body and nature, between humans and environment, individual and world. And yet: the world does not encase the body, it does not capture or close it in. It is the body that captures the globe, embraces the landscape and appears to lie over it. And then: it is the world landscape itself that passes over it in flowing light, appears to dissolve in the warmth. The kneeling female nude that dances with? in front of? behind? the fire, moves in rhythm to the tongues of flame.The various levels of meaning correspond to the many steps of Walter Ehrismann's strenuous technical process. Skill and precision lead to a mixture of image layers, from the foreground and the background, inside and outside, materialistic and iconographic. It is the landscape, the fire that serves as a fundament built in a three-step aquatint, each with a different colour. The black and white photographs of a female body, photo-chemically transferred onto a fourth copperplate, is etched into the plate with dust grains. Natural elements are connected through the use of technical media and materials and visual elements to the body landscape. What is to be found under the soft skin, what steps suddenly into the light of day? Is that the inside of the body, there where the gaze falls into the circle? Is it the retina of the observer, in which the body is mirrored, that seeks beyond the eye to find the invisible behind the visible? Just like the Renaissance artist who sought clues to the inside in the outer elements of the body, Walter Ehrismann looks behind the surface appearance. And it is not only the anatomical structure, which forms the perfect body, that he penetrates, it is much more, it is the human in-between levels that he feels, the indescribable levels of thinking and feeling that are over everything and raise the person in his environment to a individual. Franziska Lentzsch