Candelair behaves exactly like Apple's IR driver when it comes to waking displays. Here's the full description from the release notes that should also answer your questions:

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Enhancement: Updated driver (1.18.1) now shows the same display wakeup behavior under Lion as the driver supplied by Apple® with OS X® Lion GM:

1) the display is woken up when a sleeping system was woken up with the Apple® Remote.

2) the display will not be woken up when only the display is sleeping and the system is not sleeping. 
[Update (11/08/05): It is worth mentioning that, under Lion, selecting "Sleep" from the Apple® menu may often only sleep the display, but not the system (as in previous OS X releases). Our tests indicate that whether your system or only its displays are put to sleep may - at least partially - depend on whether your Mac® is connected to a power adapter or running on battery. F.ex. our Mac® Pro would always only sleep the displays (the CPU fans and drives remain on), whereas one of our MacBook® Pros would transition from sleeping displays into actual sleep as soon as we disconnected the power adapter from it. Then again, our newest MacBook® Pro always goes directly to sleep, regardless of the power source used.]

If you want your display to be woken up whenever you press a button on your Apple® Remote, you should give Remote Buddy a try, which provides this more HTPC-friendly behaviour. 
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Best regards, 
Felix Schwarz