Italian printmaker Elisa Bertocchi has built a practice around imaginary landscapes where women, animals and botanical life exist in quiet harmony, all hand-printed from linocut one layer at a time.
Some introductions to a medium are gradual. Elisa Bertocchi’s was not. “I’ve always loved drawing, but when I discovered linocutting, my life changed.” She was at artistic high school when she made her first linocut print, and that was enough. The directness of the process, the physical commitment of cutting into a surface, the particular quality of the resulting mark, took hold immediately and has not let go since.
Now 24 and based in Italy, Bertocchi has spent the years since developing a practice built around multilayer hand printing and a visual world entirely her own. Her prints picture imaginary scenarios where nature and people exist in quiet coexistence: women, animals and botanical elements combined into compositions designed to carry a feeling of internal peace. There is nothing naive about this ambition. Creating stillness through image is one of the harder things to pull off, and Bertocchi does it through careful construction, starting each piece with a pencil sketch drawn from her own imagination, often supported by references found in books, before moving into digital work to resolve composition and colour. Only then does the cutting begin.
The multilayer approach she has devoted herself to is where linocut becomes genuinely demanding. Each colour requires a separate block, a separate pass through the press, a separate opportunity for something to shift. The registration, the sequencing, the way colours interact when laid over one another, all of it has to be thought through before the first cut is made. Bertocchi describes herself as still experimenting, still mapping the possibilities the technique offers, which feels like exactly the right disposition for a practice this rooted in process and discovery.
What comes through across her prints is a consistent emotional register: calm, considered, rooted in the natural world. The scenarios she invents are not documentary or symbolic in any heavy-handed sense. They are simply places where the relationship between human figures and the living world around them is one of belonging rather than tension. That quietly held belief, expressed through the physical act of hand printing, gives the work its character.
Elisa Bertocchi is a linocut printmaker based in Italy. All prints are hand printed.
All images courtesy Elisa Bertocchi. All prints hand printed.
