Radu Băieş is, above all else, a painter of light and metaphor. The topics of his painterly works range from vaguely fantastic, pastoral scenes to gently mystical ones that embody somewhat imprecise, yet strongly suggestive symbolism. Cultivating perspectival ambiguities and semantic richness at the same time, his compositions seem to point towards a register of existence that is simultaneously somewhat apart from mundane realities, but at the same time serves as its foundation, its true scaffolding. His iconography is subtly linked to that of a primary Christianity, while his images tend to always have a cosmic allure, which is unhinged by the pastoral simplicity that they often exude.
In some of his paintings, Băieş blends the mythologic and the mundane in scenes that appear to aim at reminding (and compelling) the viewer that the sacred (or the mythical) is not a distant, phantasmal or theoretical realm, but a present, encompassing reality. Characters that seem directly borrowed from Renaissance depictions of Christ’s flagellation populate a dramatic, yet somehow sketchy landscape, for example, suggesting that a sacred drama unfolds in the world permanently, albeit inconspicuously. In other images, enigmatic shepherds cohabitate with saint-like silhouettes, calmly watching over uncannily blue sheep or a rather coarsely dressed man, bent over a fire can be simply a shepherd preparing his meal, although the solemn lighting may as well compel one to think of a patriarch, as if what is being depicted would be the call to Abraham, for example. Then there are the trees: the Cluj-based painter has a remarkable ability to paint them as solid, imposing masses, with their crowns rendered in a synthetic manner that grants them a particular noblesse, while at the same time they seem to irradiate light, as if they were the actual source of it.
Thus, Băieş rhetorically emphasizes the transformational force of painting, its magic-like power by the use of gesturally rendered backgrounds or dream-like, almost fantastic lighting of the landscapes. Corroborated with a dignified atmosphere, these expressive instruments give most of his works an uncanny quality, a Baroque sense of dramatic scenography and a sort of metaphorical dignity, not entirely alien to a Symbolist mindset.