At the beginning of his career, Rogério Ribeiro joined the neo-realist movement. However, throughout his life, despite maintaining his political and ethical concerns, his themes and forms will undergo natural metamorphoses, following the author's artistic and intellectual growth. Generally figurative, his work has, however, an exceptional temporal nucleus to this rule, from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. During this period, his work displays an abstract experimentation. Although the ethical assumptions remain, the blackness of the political period in Portugal at the time, under a dictatorship, echoes in his distressed creations, of great formal restraint, served by a palette of few contrasts. It is in this phase of exception that this work is integrated.

Over a background that shows no references, surfaces a frame whose interior captures the viewer's gaze. As if analysing the role of painting in hard times, the material under analysis is its colours (with rare elements of contrast) and its geometric outline, formed by oblique lines and patches of colour. Despite the focus on this interior frame (suggesting a window view to a soulful landscape, as if we were peeking into the artist's mind) such oblique shapes and lines create elements of instability and vertigo. The palette highlights this sense of inner chasm, going from brighter tones to a progressively darker centre. The three bright red patches, the greatest chromatic contrast in the whole of the composition, lead the viewer's gaze into the whirlwind, accentuating this feeling of falling and fading.