Fernando Ortega presents Manicure for Siembra, a project with which he seeks to provoke a voluntary synaesthetic response based on color and music. Intervened photographs come from the artist's personal archive, in which he has accumulated still images of the hands of renowned musicians that he has extracted from videos of concerts and piano recitals. For this he draws on the expertise of manicurists, who are colorists by trade, and invites them to respond spontaneously and personally to a piece of music through color. As part of the process, each manicurist listens to a piece of piano music chosen by the artist and then select a nail polish color based on what the music elicits to, and applies it on a photograph of the concert they have just heard.

In Manicure, Fernando Ortega orchestrates an intersection of the senses of sight and hearing, as well as a translation from one language to another mediated by the subjectivity and imagination of the listener. Ortega finds in the wide range of tones offered by the beauty salon an ideal language to experiment with synaesthetic modes of interpretation, and to distance himself from the connotations of seriousness or solemnity that usually surround the piano as an instrument. The fondness for music has been constantly present in Ortega's work. Ortega is distinguished by a great sensitivity towards the poetics of the subtle events that make up everyday life, as well as by an acute inventiveness to produce events that with great simplicity disrupt the natural order of things.