Sleeping under the silver tree

Radu Băieş’s trees burn with a serene fire, like so many blazing bushes that forever count, contemplate, and whisper each passing second. At their feet, creatures are absorbed in crucial tasks. Belonging at once to the world of humans and to that of souls, they intertwine lovingly, prepare to mount fantastic horses, converse with luminous entities, tame monsters, calmly rearrange graves, and carry out the work of dreams.

«The mountain is the link between Earth and Sky» wrote René Daumal in his abruptly unfinished work. Here, the mountains, undeniably present, seem to delegate their mysterious cosmic power to the trees, those vertical, silvery maelstroms; and in return, the trees appear to promise to carry the dreams of the sleeping creatures toward eternal realms.

With Sleeping under the silver tree, Radu Băieş offers us an immense gift: that of lifting the veil upon a fragment of eternity, the Αἰών (Aiôn), one of the three ways, perhaps the most sublime, of conceiving time in ancient Greek culture. Through the diaphanous hues of these twentythree paintings, through whirlwinds of color and locally hyperrealist details characteristic of the Cluj school, he speaks to us of love, of St. Elmo’s fires that never cease.

Cheek press’d to cheek, there in sweet ecstasy we,

Falling asleep under the old locust-tree,

Smiling in dream, seem in a heaven to live,

For such a night who his whole life would not give?

Eve On The Hill, Mihai Eminescu

In the heart of the night, the creatures sleep peacefully amid the thunderous silence of the will-o’-the-wisps, the distant echo of an Orthodox Kyrie Eleison, and these verses by Mihai Eminescu.

“And bare neck bathed in the cool blue cress” (Le dormeur du val, Arthur Rimbaud) , these travelers may already have crossed into the beyond. If that is so, we secretly hope they will never cease to send us signs through the canvas through the sooty silvering of the mirror.

Texte by aurèce vettier

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