Introduction

Venice Architecture Biennale (Common Ground)

The Grazia factory in Deruta celebrates its first five hundred years with a special edition of ceramics on display from November 3, 2012, at the Italian Pavilion of the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The Economist and Family Business ranking consider Grazia among the oldest family-owned factories in the world since the Grazia family, originally from northern Italy, established an activity in Deruta in the early sixteenth century. The centuries-old activity of the factory has never stopped, and despite the recurring market crises, today Ubaldo Grazia and his collaborators, including his daughter Chiara, continue to update the family tradition. While the ancient production is collected in a corporate museum rich in over eight hundred works, the current production not only reproduces historical decorations but decidedly looks to contemporary art and design. In 2012, Grazia hosted architect Michele De Lucchi, for whom they created a special series of limited-edition vases. A complex operation that involved extensive material experimentation conducted in the factory by Nicola Boccini and Riccardo Muti, who translated into ceramics, from the original computer-processed designs, vases of extraordinary modernity for Michele De Lucchi’s “Produzione Privata.”

Maiolica that Doesn’t Seem Like Maiolica

At the foot of the hill on which the historic center of Deruta stands, along Via Tiberina, are the locations of the artisan workshops of maiolica that have emerged over the years, each with a display window facing the street, dotted with colorful pottery, like the painted face of a productive body. As in every Italian district that inherits a tradition and makes it a reason for existence and social progress, developing an industry sufficient to support generations, on this street, medium-small-sized establishments have emerged, many still family-run, where a strong sense of investiture as custodians of a craft tradition is prevalent.

On Via Tiberina, Michele De Lucchi, intellectual, architect, and designer, and Ubaldo Grazia, heir to a company that has been artisanally producing objects in glazed red clay since 1497, met a couple of years ago.

Before then, many artists and decorators had passed through these lands to learn artisanal techniques and the behavior of maiolica. Starting from the 1980s, at the invitation of Ubaldo Grazia, artists entered his factory and sat at the tables of turners and decorators or in dedicated creative workshops with the push to innovate the language. Among the works of American artists, one can find the surprising macabre decorations of Peter Shire. After studying the production processes of glazed clay and the models of pottery that have been handed down since the sixteenth century, and after learning techniques such as dusting for faithful reproduction of decorations, many artists designed forms and patterns starting from the traditionally used maiolica color palette. A new image was thus inserted into tradition, becoming instrumental, so that maiolica became more appealing and closer to contemporary taste.

The research that Michele De Lucchi conducted with the Ubaldo Grazia company uses graphics and its message about the feeling of time to make a technical innovation on the process, with effects on color and surface finish.

Known worldwide for projects like the Tolomeo desk lamp and for leading the design office of Olivetti for a decade, designing over a hundred office machines, Michele De Lucchi uses color and material finish to convey messages at any scale: when designing objects, like the Murano glass lamps or the kilims for Produzione Privata, when setting up exhibitions, like those of Caravaggio or Tintoretto at the Quirinale Stables in Rome, and work environments, like Italian post offices, as well as when relating architecture to the landscape, as in the project to redevelop Enel power plants. Heir to the experience of Alchimia and Memphis, De Lucchi relates decoration, graphics, and color to material and form, mediating the project with the artistic influences of the contemporary.

The project of the seven vases begins with the forms, made of three parts: dome, cup, and silver-plated brass base, whose design departs from the furrow of tradition to reach the definition and sequence of colors. Wanting to trace a line with the past, De Lucchi does not select colors from the standard maiolica palette but creates them in four-color printing on the computer to achieve a precise coding of blues, greens, grays, yellows, browns, and golds, to be applied to the piece in a combination of bright and muted tones, as backgrounds and as fillings for graphic themes. In the same vase, the tones of the backgrounds and those of the decorations resonate from the cup to the dome, generating a precise rhythm of alternations.

Here is the innovation he requested from Ubaldo Grazia, and here is their ability to understand the opportunity and make available a research team, led by technologist Nicola Boccini, to initiate an experiment that would make the colors created in the laboratory based on four-color printing compatible with the piece to be decorated.

While traditionally the maiolica process involves creating the vase on the lathe, drying, the first firing, and then glazing, which constitutes a base for applying color and its subsequent fusion with the biscuit in the second firing, in this specific case, no glaze layer was applied. Instead, a special colored engobe was created, consisting of dry mixing white clay, pigments, zinc, tin, and a low/fusible frit, the latter essential to achieve the fusion-vitrification of colors on the biscuit and prevent dripping and defects. The engobes were then applied directly for background filling using the brush application technique. Riccardo Muti, artistic director of U. Grazia, placed the vase on a manual lathe and, using a brush (various brushes), applied the colored engobe to the rotating biscuit. After painting the decorations using the traditional dusting technique and applying the color for subsequent steps, before the second and final firing, a matte crystalline was applied to some fillets and semi-glossy to others, a silica that prepares the piece for firing and makes it resistant. In light of the path taken, with crystalline, glossy or matte satin depending on the points, the last missing element was added to the maiolica processing, which in the traditional process is an integral part of the glaze.

Preserving something in defiance of an ever-changing external world means being aware of the value that history has left, akin to a somatic trait, a characteristic of uniqueness that deserves to be passed down as a testament. Ubaldo Grazia, grandfather of the current owner who bears the same name, designed the building that would house the factory, and in 1921 the entire Grazia production moved from the sixteenth-century headquarters in the center of Deruta to Via Tiberina, where today there is still an industrial architecture built from logistic-production, lighting, and organization of semi-finished movements, in addition to energy exploitation needs. The placement of the kiln at the center of the complex was intended to save resources needed for heating. As the phenomenon was widespread, with entire families employed at the company, where father and mother worked together in the factory, Ubaldo set up a canteen for the workers and a babysitting service, which today brings to mind the social

Mara Corradi

Project: Michele De Lucchi
Production: Produzione Privata
Designer 3d: Philippe Nigro
Grafic Designer : Maddalena Molteni
Ceramic Color Technologist and A.D: Nicola Boccini 
Production Manager: Nora De Cicco
Arrangement: Ditta Ubaldo Grazia Deruta
Ceramic Painter: Riccardo Muti,
Exhibitions: Milano (Salone del Mobile 2012), Perugia (Festarch 2012), Venice Biennale 2012 (Common Ground), Moscow 2013, Eataly New York 2013.
web: www.produzioneprivata.it