For years, Elwyn Murphy sat metres from the entrance of the Air Canada Centre, but never once stepped inside.

That is, until last Thursday, when an act of street-level serendipity plucked the homeless man from the pavement to the stands above centre ice. His first Maple Leafs game.

The random benefactors, Michelle Gingrich and fiancé Todd Brilhante, had just upgraded their seats, getting a whole new pair. The Waterloo-area twosome gave the original ticket to Murphy, a man who was sitting outside in the cold.

“This couple walking by me asks if I want to go to the hockey game and I said, ‘well sure, I’ve never been to a Toronto Maple Leafs game before,’ ” recalled Murphy.

Later, Gingrich uploaded to Facebook a photograph they’d taken to remember the occasion andnone of which offers a rationale for the expressive potential they feel their art contains.

As seen in this excerpt, the Neo-Concrete Movement seeks to move beyond the Concrete Artist’s ideal of mathematical purity in art and embrace phenomenology. Gullar continues on in his manifesto to call for an artwork that “amounts to more than the sum of its constituent elements; something which analysis may break down into various elements but which can only be understood phenomenologically.” The Neo-Concretists believed artworks should interact with the spectator and make the spectator more aware of his or her physical body and metaphysical existence. It is only with the participation of the spectator that the artwork becomes complete.

Early life, "Poema Sujo" and exile
Ferreira Gullar was born in São Luís, Maranhão, Northeast Brazil.