15. Backgammon Set [1982- 1983]

The pieces tell the story of the lifelong friendship of Constantin Tacou, Horia Damian and Ovidiu Maitec. In 1982, in Paris, on a summer afternoon, Constantin Tacou - the head of the L'Herne publishing house, which published Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, among others - the brother of painter Sultana Maitec, was visiting their friend Horia Damian together with the sculptor Ovidiu Maitec at the former's workshop in Montparnasse, above the restaurant "La Coupole". They often met like this, over a "cauldron" of minced meat rolled in vine leaves, cooked by Horia Damian, and they played backgammon. As usual, Horia Damian won, the stake being a new backgammon box made by Ovidiu Maitec. All three excitedly started to make the plans of this new box, and Horia Damian quickly took a handy lithograph from a work board and started to sketch/paint the future box, as he saw it, on the back of the lithograph. After a while they agreed it would be much more interesting to create one of the typical sculptural elements of Ovidiu Maitec on the two sides of the game: square wood inlays, instead of the crescent that we see in the initial drawing. Maitec makes this backgammon set, as well as the pieces inside, in 1983, with one side whose inlays have been polished and lacquered with shellac, as Horia Damian wanted, and the other with matte inlays, as the sculptor Maitec wanted.

Dimensions

custom 58x 27 cmx 4 cm deschisă; 72.5x 101 cm

Description

walnut wood; watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper, signed and dated "OM, 1983", in wood; signed, dated and dedicated illegibly lower centre, in pencil, "Horia Damian, 3.4.(19)82, "Pour Costa, (...)"

Dating

1982- 1983

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