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Hauntingly beautiful… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to mind when staring at Eva Helene Pade’s paintings. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking over the elegant architecture of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic energy, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting through moody, dramatic atmospheres shaped by color sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and multiple new auction records set at auction (the latest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Told #14 (2021) sold for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view through December 20, 2025) brings together a new group of paintings in which Eva Helene Pade continues to explore the violent and seductive forces that exist between bodies in space. The body is examined here as both a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Painting becomes a vehicle for a continuous exercise of female embodiment and disembodiment, creating both a dance and a tension that unfolds within the canvas and the surrounding space. “Color is crucial for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette often defines the atmosphere of a work before the figures even appear.”
Pade turns the canvas into a living stage where color and movement try to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her process is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of painting itself, beginning with an abstract field and moving through a fluid process of identification and alienation. “I start drawing figures into it. At first, they appear as little blobs, and gradually I begin carving them out until the forms start taking shape, only to change again and become something else entirely,” she says. Pade also tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an inner world of narratives and transforming its prelinguistic storytelling into a tool to address universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very instinctively, letting intuition lead. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it surprises me. I rely on that tension,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, though certain painters have always remained with her. The psychological charge of her work recalls the emotional and psychological layering of artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, as well as older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how much emotion can be conveyed through a gesture or pose.
Still, despite this intuitive channeling through pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they’re personal but not literal. “I don’t paint people from my life, nor do I use photographic references. They’re intuitive, almost dreamlike—images that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the subconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the inner and outer world, a boundary that painting can reveal. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I began drawing as a means to process both external reality and my inner world,” Pade says. She never had strict academic training, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and form, which may be why her figures appear slightly off, existing within her own visual logic. “That wonkiness has become my language.”
The canvas becomes the stage where the “shadow,” the “removed,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I keep molding the surface, working into the face, pulling new elements out of the shadows that I hadn’t noticed before,” Pade confirms. “A dark color might form a symbol or pattern, which I then push back into the composition.” It’s a long, layered process that involves as much waiting and letting the paint dry as it does discovery and transformation.
Still, it’s immediately apparent upon entering the show that this new body of work engages with femininity, sensuality and the position of the female body in space. Painting is for Pade a means of exploring the relationship between self and surroundings, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines identity between body and soul, between the one and the many. Her figures, often expressionless and featureless, convey emotion through gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical reading.
What she paints is a potentially cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity in which the self is continually dissolved and rediscovered. Pade began painting crowds during lockdown, reflecting the strange collective isolation of that time. “They’re images of people together, but not necessarily about any specific moment. They’re more like metaphors of time itself.”
There is always a narrative in her paintings, but it remains open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the external world that Pade paints. “I don’t want to trap the viewer in a single message. It’s more like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and physical response that builds its own logic,” she says.
Once the paintings are presented outside of the studio, they gain new context from the space and from the people who encounter them. In London, Pade wanted to choreograph her own visual rhythm, thinking about how the paintings could occupy the space almost like stage sets. “The exhibition space was so unconventional that I had to respond directly to its quirks—the staircase, the unusual angles—so I began playing with composition almost like orchestration,” she explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but she clearly thinks compositionally, almost like a stage director. The paintings are intentionally life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, much like in a nightclub or a theater. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the passive distance between viewer and painting.”
Although the works are two-dimensional, they feel animated by their dense atmospheres, where bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by soft billows of smoke or lit from within by a flaming glow or radiant beams of light. Lifting the paintings off the wall and letting them float through the space isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to hover or drift in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” she notes.
While staging the paintings outside her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer could see their backs—the wooden stretchers, sketches and raw marks behind the surface. They became living metaphors for the relationship between inner world and external space. “I liked that transparency, that glimpse into process. Light passed through them in interesting ways, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to move with them. It became immersive. You could almost walk into the composition.”
In the space, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography found their living essence again, becoming interlocutors with the viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, an expansive narrative field where everyone can identify and project their own meanings, the universal power of connection offered by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its endless variations is proof of how her art can still evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as painting remains for her both a necessity and an urgency, a means to confront and process the multifaceted reality of the world. “You learn technique, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The potentially continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring excitement for painting. “I don’t plan big conceptual changes. It evolves organically with each new piece,” she reflects. “Some paintings fail; I destroy or hide them if they don’t resonate. I think it’s crucial to be self-critical. A work that doesn’t move me won’t move anyone else.”
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Elisa Carollo
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