The harlequin is a very common figure in the magic and haunting pictorial universe of Joan Ponç, and it often appears in the form of a self-portrait. The identity of these two harlequin-like characters named Fanafafa and Veribú is not clear. The artist liked to invent names for his fantastical characters. Malignant buffoons? Evil creatures? Dream-like figures? Toothless and with incredibly long fingers, they smile threateningly on a very dark stage. With his typically brilliant and nocturnal colours, Ponç constructs an eerie scene with objects from magic and astrology such as the sphere, the square and the cone. These are geometrical figures that also belong to the world of ideas, and, as such, they confer on the artist the role of a prophet who can predict the future. Dating from 1950, the work was made two years after Ponç had founded, together with Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart, Joan Brossa and Arnau Puig, the group and the magazine called Dau al Set, creators of a visual language close to Surrealism known as ‘plastic magicism’, a term coined by the critic Juan Eduardo Cirlot. Of all these artists, Ponç would remain the most faithful to this style, and at that time he was already incorporating the figure of the artist as prophet in his work, a symbology he never abandoned.