In the current exhibition Labyrinth of the Heart and Paradise of the World, Radu Băieş emphasizes the increasingly urgent need to find one’s own refuge — a place of calm and an imagined inner balance. His latest series of paintings builds upon his established visual language and reflects on events of recent years in the surrounding world.
The artist perceives the human being as an individual subjected to a test: the search for one’s own “paradise” within a labyrinth. This labyrinth is present on both the formal and the conceptual level. Within it, one seeks personal paths, is tempted by its allure, or is drawn to a detail that subtly guides the whole.
Curated by Jan Kudrna.
Painting as a unit of universal language. These few words alone could serve as a functional title for an exhibition, an essay, or anything else that brings together a seemingly endless segment of experience and technique into a shaped subset. We can begin this way, however general we may be. The essence remains clear. Painting as a means of communication can achieve many things. It can be used to make allegorical comments, present factual arguments, and in the past, it could also be used to shock. It is also remarkable that we can find parallels in painting (and elsewhere, of course) and art.
In his current series of paintings, Radu Baies analyzes the theme of the labyrinth. The visuality of this main element is secondary; the paintings are not existentially dependent on its depiction. The labyrinth is a keystone, a matrix, and a frame on which the story is essentially suspended. A symbol and a boundary. The merit of the author's current series is the labyrinth, just as in Jan Ámos Komenský's work The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. Komenský published his work in 1623 and returned to the text in the following years wherever he lived and worked. The essence of his story lay in a seemingly banal twist. After gaining experience in the real world, the pilgrim finds true paradise within himself, in his heart. Paradise was not hidden in the labyrinth of the world. There was no need to search for it in the winding alleys and paths. Comenius wrote his work on the eve of and during the Thirty Years' War, the most brutal conflict of the modern era until 1914. Radu Baies uses the labyrinth in a similar way. For him, it is a symbol. For Comenius, it represents the surrounding world, intricate connections, contexts, and illegible paths that are confusing from the perspective of a small person. Baies places people in roles in which they face and struggle with the labyrinth. They try to disrupt and resist it. The resistance is hidden only in how people stoically accept the labyrinth in the paintings. The painting does not change; it is based on the experience of previous series. What is essential is the content, the new layer.
At a certain point, however, the starting points of Radu Baies and Jan Amos Comenius diverge. After a while, Comenius' pilgrim reaches a point where, betrayed by the world, he finds paradise in his heart and in Christ. Radu, on the other hand, still perceives the world as a place that gets a chance. Again and again. A place that contains labyrinth(s). For him, the heart is the place in each of us that determines how much the world will resemble paradise.
Curated by Jan Kudrna
