Eva Helene Pade: Søgelys Don't miss Eva Helene Pade’s choreography of color and desire at Thaddaeus Ropac
By Elisa Carollo
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.
