Aldo Paparella (Minturno, Italy, 1920–Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1977) fought in Africa during the Second WW and was taken prisoner in France. He arrived in Argentina in 1950, bringing a new approach to non–figurative and Informalist sculpture. In the late-1950s, in his Sugerencias [Suggestions] series, he started working with waste materials. His aggressive use of sheet metal gave it an informal quality, and Paparella began to think from the perspective of the object itself, rather than from any traditional concepts rooted in the language of sculpture. This idea is developed in his Muebles inútiles [Useless Furniture]. In the early-1970s he makes the Monumentos inútiles [Useless Monuments], his most significant work, out of humble materials.Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos (1939–92) was representative of the 1960s generation of artists, especially as regards the relationship between art and life. Highlights of his work include his matter paintings on precarious materials, the installation Nosotros afuera [We, the Outsiders] (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1965), and a large body of conceptual work based on writing. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, but his use of the funds to take his friends to dinner at the Alvear Hotel and to buy works of art led to some tense conversations with the American institution. In that same year he wrote his Manifiesto Gánico [Feel-like-it Manifesto]. In 1972, Peralta Ramos entered himself as his own exhibit in the CAyC, as a means of affirming his idea that the “object is the subject.” Peralta Ramos and Paparella enjoyed a friendship that was based on a shared respect for the importance of free will in artistic creation, and on an agreement that the point of contact of matter was the core issue in a work of art (especially during Peralta Ramos’s early period). This document provides an intimate look at the latter artist.