— Pasta Fatal | 2024
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys

PASTA FATAL takes place in a quasi-two-dimensional grey space, with minimalist markings that demarcate the floor and a door.​ The space is inhabited by colourful, skeletal figures made of hinged wooden slats and polystyrene heads.

Fritz, a German psychopath, is red and wears mirrored sunglasses through which he can look at genitals. Jacobina Bienebol is venomous green; she has permanently distanced herself from reality and is in a constant trance. Jacobus Ras is brown, small, and terrorises his audience with forced monologues about himself as 'the boss of Sint-Niklaas' and idiotic rhymes about a louse. The other puppets—a blind orange giant, a gray twin duo, a purple Spaniard, a light gray German woman from the Middle Ages, a beige German aristocratic spider, and a blue French prisoner—silently observe the succession of trivial, repetitive aggression, ridiculous tricks, religious litanies, and psychopathic and autistic stares.

​

PASTA FATAL, originally a brand of rat poison, reflects a recurring theme in the work of de Gruyter & Thys: an obsessive fascination with the morphology of depression and the inevitable downfall of mankind. Extended close-ups of despairing, diabolical, and catatonic faces induce a trance-like state, where the actors gradually transform into sculptures within the film. The subject ultimately becomes an object, or vice versa.