Metalia, a note of materic love from ceramics to metal
What happens when painted ceramic meets hand-finished metal? The answer is Metalia, a collection by Natalia Criado for Laboratorio Paravicini built on translation, equilibrium, and six months of shared challenges and aligned intentions.
Some collaborations work not despite their differences, but because of them. Metalia – the new collection developed by Laboratorio Paravicini and Natalia Criado – is exactly that kind of project. Ceramic and metal, painted surface and sculpted volume, Milanese craft tradition and Colombian-inflected geometry: the tension between these elements is not incidental. It is the point.
Natalia Criado has spent years working around a precise idea – that the everyday object deserves the same formal rigour as jewellery or sculpture. Born in Colombia and trained in industrial design at IED in Milan, her practice moves at the intersection of two cultural inheritances: the pre-Columbian volumetric tradition and the Italian savoir-faire she absorbed during her formation. Her objects in brass, silvered metal and aluminium are assembled, welded and hand-finished in Italy in collaboration with specialist craftspeople. The results are pieces of essential geometry – considered, calibrated, precise in the way things are when someone has thought carefully about both their form and the gesture of whoever holds them.
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Laboratorio Paravicini occupies a different but complementary position. Founded by Costanza Paravicini – who began, as the best things often do, by making something for her own home – the atelier has grown from a small experimental workshop into an internationally recognised ceramics studio without ever abandoning its artisanal core. Based in the courtyard of a neoclassical building in Milan’s 5VIE district, it is now run by a team of around ten people, including the founder and her three daughters, Benedetta, Margherita, and Bona, combining hand-painting, mixed techniques, and print processes to produce both bespoke commissions and seasonal collections.
Metalia grew from a question: how do you give meaning to a table that genuinely belongs to two different worlds? As Benedetta Medici, Production and Communication Manager of Laboratorio Paravicini, describes it: “We tried to understand how to give an intention to the table that combined the balance between two different materials. From that question, a table was born that – in the essence of balance – reflected an idea of something contemporary but not formal at the same time. Something new, suspended, dreamlike.”
The shared visual research that followed translated Criado‘s sculptural vocabulary – blades, spheres, reflective surfaces – into a new decorative language for ceramics. The collection comprises two families of hand-crafted plates: Lamina, available in serving, flat and dessert formats, and Sfere Colorate, across flat plates and bread plates. The motifs remain deliberately abstract, conceived not as symbols but as studies in light, volume and equilibrium. Where the designer works with actual metal, the atelier recreates its reflective quality and volumetric presence through painted geometry – an act of translation that required months of research and experimentation to get right.
For the designer, the collaboration carried as much human weight as it did creative: “It was a very interesting experience. The exercise was that they were inspired by my shapes. I was inspired by their world. We both have craftsmanship. They are women, so it was very beautiful, very poetic. We shared both shapes and ways of working. And not only that – I understood how in six months you genuinely learn how they work at the workshop level, because you get so close to their process that it ends up feeling like a six-month relationship.”
Alongside the ceramics, the presentation includes a selection of Criado’s tableware objects, such as metal underplates, coffee cups, vases, centrepieces, cutlery, serving elements, smaller accessories, and newer pieces connected to the ritual of aperitivo. Polished and satin finishes create subtle variations in reflection that speak directly to the matte white of the ceramic surfaces – a balance between luminosity and softness that feels calibrated rather than accidental.
The whole is presented through an installation titled The Invisible Table, in which objects appear suspended in space rather than arranged on a conventional surface. Again, Benedetta explains, the initial spark came from an unexpected source: “It all started with a suggestive image of a table made by an artist in the 1960s – a reticulated structure – which we then translated through the culture of both brands. Several calls, several meetings, and above all, several car trips made by these craftspeople to refine, step by step, exactly what we were after.”
The choice of an invisible table tells us that we can shift the reading from tableware to composition and give spatial poetry a function. Equilibrium, rhythm, suspension – the same qualities that define each individual piece – become the logic of the whole.
What also emerges from this project is a recognition of shared condition, that when two artisanal realities navigate the same challenges, they can translate design into detail to manage production alongside distribution. “Even talking about our drives to each other’s studios, we find the same problems,” they note at the end. “That’s also what’s beautiful – a common life that resembles itself.“
Metalia is on view from 20 to 26 April at Laboratorio Paravicini, Via Nerino 8, Milan. Open Monday to Sunday 10am-6pm, Wednesday until 22:00.
About the author
Ludovica Proietti, journalist, design historian and curator, teaches in universities and curates events, always exploring projects with fresh, unconventional perspectives.
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