When in 1827 Thomas de Quincey wrote On murder considered one of the fine arts, he made reference to some theories of his time that linked the criminal personality with certain physical conditions. In the text, thick thumbs, aquiline noses and other physical characteristics are associated with the criminal tendencies of certain subjects. This type of biological determinism, which in part helped support certain discourses such as that of the Nazis or, more recently, Southafrica’s Apartheid, is the speculative basis of Ortega’s video.

In this piece the artist examines how a person’s physical characteristics condition her personality. In this case, he replaces two well knows characters, the comedy duo “Faemino y Cansado”, with two men whose physical appearances are very similar to those of the duo. We watch the art critic David G. Torres and the musician and cultural agitator Oscar Abril Ascaso faultlessly reproduce, shot by shot, a well known sketch by the mentioned comedians. Ortega’s experiment thus attempts to underscore the validity of such theories. When the actors imitate the original characters, the fact that the physical appearance is so similar to the originals, helps define their character (in the case of Faemino and Cansado, the physical characteristics correspond to that of the typical clown pair, Cara Blanca and Augusto). Despite this, this amusing video is a kind of sociological experiment that makes us consider Ortega as a crazy artist/inventor, ready to try out his eccentric theories in his artistic works.

This piece is another of the many experiments with which Ortega examines the social construction of persons and characters. This work can be perfectly understood in relation to other videos such as Populismo y Popularidad, in which the character of Yola Berrocal is taken apart, or Aprensión y Esoterismo, in which we see how a man constructs his own self out of his fears and possible diseases.