Empyrius

Empyrius is a sculptural chess set that explores the expressive potential of industrial ceramics through a dialogue between surface and volume, tactility and abstraction. Developed in collaboration with Mirage, the project reinterprets porcelain stoneware not as a passive architectural surface, but as a medium for narrative form and symbolic function.

Empyrius — image 1
1. Empyrius reinterprets Mirage porcelain stoneware into a sculptural chess set, where stacked slabs transform surface into volume, tactility into narrative form.

Rooted in the material’s architectural DNA, the project leverages multiple thicknesses of Mirage slabs, stacked and offset to generate a new kind of topography — one defined not by decoration, but by depth and contrast. Each chess piece is designed as a totemic volume, where the external surface and the raw inner core are in deliberate tension. The pieces oscillate between refinement and rawness: polished contours meet fractured edges, industrial precision meets material honesty. The board itself follows the same logic. The chess grid becomes a stage for elevation, perception, and ritual — each tile a material sample, each square a contrast between tactility and logic, surface and soul. In line with contemporary design trends that valorize unrefined materials and visible production processes, Empyrius strips away ornamental excess to reveal the material’s latent value. By doing so, it reclaims industrial stoneware as an object of desire — not for its perfection, but for its honest texture, density, and unexpected sculptural potential.

Empyrius — image 2
2. Each piece was individually sketched to balance originality with immediate recognizability, mediating the identity of traditional chess forms through a new material language.

But Empyrius is more than an exercise in form. It is a meditation on opposition and duality: black and white, rough and smooth, elevated and grounded. The very nature of chess — a game of opposing forces in structured play — becomes a metaphor for design practice itself: constraint and creativity held in equilibrium. Through this collection, Mirage is not just a material supplier, but a design protagonist — its identity embedded in every millimeter of the layered slab. Empyrius becomes a vessel of brand narrative, where the product becomes not only an object but a manifesto: bold, minimal, tactile, and deeply grounded in its material origin. The Mirage Expansion installation was showcased at Via Cerva 24, in the heart of Milan’s Durini Design District, during Milan Design Week 2023. The exhibition spanned multiple environments designed to blur the lines between material, digital, and natural dimensions — a fitting context for experimental ceramic applications. Curated under the artistic direction of Giulio Cappellini and featuring eleven distinct pieces by the Prisma Project team, the exhibition transformed the space into a dynamic design laboratory. Installed within gallery-like rooms, the works highlighted Mirage’s porcelain stoneware as a noble, expressive material — elevated through creative collaboration, material experimentation, and spatial storyt