A self-taught artist, after the Spanish Civil War Viola went into exile to France where he had his first contact with Surrealism. On returning to Spain, his practice gradually moved closer to Informalismo and to a use of colour which he then abandoned for some years in favour of black and white, although returning to colour once again.

This acrylic on paper belongs to a moment when Viola introduced chromatic nuances executed in a range of green hues and with strong contrasts of shadow and light, a somewhat violent gesturality and brushwork that plays with the tempo of the paint, fusing some tones and respecting others, depending on the effect he was looking for.

A poet as well as a painter, despite his greater fame as a visual artist he also wrote a number of beautiful poems; his literary skill is also evident in the titles of many of his works. The beholdercan let his imagination fly and see in the light a flash of flapping wings, but we could also evoke a metaphorical action, a leap into the void, towards the unknown, towards that darkness that becomes light.

The similarities between this work and another one in the BBVA Collection, titled Despegando, lead us to infer that it would have been created in the 1970s, before his survey show at La Lonja in Zaragoza. It is an excellent example of the artist’s signature expressionist-tinged abstraction.