Patella is an hypnotic teller of deftly interwoven tales. The “cosmic medallions”
exhibited here are just two passages from the complex sidereal story that the artist
calls Mysterium Coniunctionis, a work developed over eleven years, during which
he reconstructed the astronomical representations of Coronelli, cosmographer to
the Sun King, and the “open skies” of his father, the cosmologist Luigi Patella. The
work consists of numerous elements that are selected in order to relate a possible
“mythocosmobiography”. The works exhibited are stellar mandalas with the profiles
of Sal and Rond, the figures with which Luca and his wife Rosa Foschi
identify, in their respective centres. Here they stage the “mystery of the conjunction”
of opposites, sun and moon, south and north, consciousness and the unconscious,
male and female – from the centre of two “round heavens”. The meeting
of Sal and Rond gives rise to complexity, adventure, love and thought. This serves,
according to the artist, to make the wheels of universal and personal time turn.
(PATELLA, 1984, pp. 3-8). (Transl. by Paul Metcalfe per Scriptum, Roma) Bibl: Bibl: L.M. PATELLA, Manière de montrer les ouvres célestes du mysterium coniunctionis, Roma 1984.