This painting from 1981 is a seminal work in the artist’s production. The choice of colours and motifs speak to his fauvist expressiveness and to his debt with Henri Matisse (1869-1954).

An architect, sculptor and painter, after a brief non-objective period in the 1960s, Navarro Baldeweg experimented with other art languages in force at the time such as , and , to create a personal brand of painting where the lead role is lent to colour and where the influence of Matisse is clearly visible.

A common bird in Spain, the swift has often been taken as a subject matter in poems —for instance, Unamuno (1864-1936) — and as a literary recourse, being a recurrent figure in literature on Castile and its inhabitants. Swifts spend most of their lives flying about. Their constancy and perseverance are implicit in this work, whose space has been divided into three sections. The colour of the background of each one of them comments on the dawn, the blinding midday sun and the pitch-dark night. In a dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the flight of the schematically outlined bird provides a specific rhythmical pattern that blends into the overall abstract whole.