Hauntingly stunning… revelatory: these are the adjectives that come to thoughts when observing Eva Helene Pade’s work. Amorphous our bodies transfer throughout the canvas like a choreography of spectral dancers, dynamically taking up the elegant structure of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in London. It’s a spectacle of erotic power, the place the facility of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, manifesting via moody, dramatic atmospheres formed by shade sensations and instinctive emotional reactions.
Following the Danish-born, Paris-based artist’s institutional debut at ARKEN Museum of Up to date Artwork in Denmark earlier this 12 months and a number of new public sale data set at public sale (the newest at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2024, when A Story to Be Instructed #14 (2021) bought for $123,417) the exhibition “Søgelys” (on view via December 20, 2025) brings collectively a brand new group of work during which Eva Helene Pade continues to discover the violent and seductive forces that exist between our bodies in house. The physique is examined right here as each a medium and a filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane via which we negotiate our interactions and relationships with others. Portray turns into a automobile for a steady train of feminine embodiment and disembodiment, creating each a dance and a rigidity that unfolds inside the canvas and the encompassing house. “Coloration is essential for me; it’s emotional and psychological,” she tells Observer. “The palette typically defines the environment of a piece earlier than the figures even seem.”
Pade turns the canvas right into a residing stage the place shade and motion attempt to spontaneously channel and translate the prelinguistic expressions of the human psyche. Her course of is deeply intuitive: the figures emerge from the act of portray itself, starting with an summary discipline and transferring via a fluid technique of identification and alienation. “I begin drawing figures into it. At first, they seem as little blobs, and progressively I start carving them out till the types begin taking form, solely to alter once more and turn out to be one thing else completely,” she says. Pade additionally tunes herself to rhythm, listening to classical music to enter an interior world of narratives and remodeling its prelinguistic storytelling right into a software to handle common questions concerning the human situation.
“I work very instinctively, letting instinct lead. Generally it fails; typically it surprises me. I depend on that rigidity,” she says, acknowledging how her influences have shifted over time, although sure painters have at all times remained together with her. The psychological cost of her work recollects the emotional and psychological layering of artists comparable to Edvard Munch, Amber Wellmann, Nicolas de Staël, Cecily Brown, Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, in addition to older masters like Rodin and Rubens, who reveal how a lot emotion may be conveyed via a gesture or pose.
Nonetheless, regardless of this intuitive channeling via pigment and shade, Pade’s works are by no means autobiographical portraits; they’re private however not literal. “I don’t paint folks from my life, nor do I exploit photographic references. They’re intuitive, virtually dreamlike—photos that emerge and shift as I work,” she explains.
Like monsters or ghosts reemerging from the unconscious, these spectral presences probe the porous diaphragm between the interior and outer world, a boundary that portray can reveal. “I’ve at all times been drawn to portray. I started drawing as a way to course of each exterior actuality and my interior world,” Pade says. She by no means had strict educational coaching, so she taught herself anatomy, proportion and kind, which can be why her figures seem barely off, current inside her personal visible logic. “That wonkiness has turn out to be my language.”
The canvas turns into the stage the place the “shadow,” the “eliminated,” is confronted in a distinctly Freudian and Jungian sense. “I preserve molding the floor, working into the face, pulling new parts out of the shadows that I hadn’t seen earlier than,” Pade confirms. “A darkish shade may kind an emblem or sample, which I then push again into the composition.” It’s a protracted, layered course of that includes as a lot ready and letting the paint dry because it does discovery and transformation.
Nonetheless, it’s instantly obvious upon coming into the present that this new physique of labor engages with femininity, sensuality and the place of the feminine physique in house. Portray is for Pade a way of exploring the connection between self and environment, how this dynamic subtly defines and redefines id between physique and soul, between the one and the numerous. Her figures, typically expressionless and featureless, convey emotion via gesture and contortion, resonating with a universality that transcends any autobiographical studying.
What she paints is a doubtlessly cacophonous orchestra of sensations and voices, a confrontation with the chaos of humanity during which the self is frequently dissolved and rediscovered. Pade started portray crowds throughout lockdown, reflecting the unusual collective isolation of that point. “They’re photos of individuals collectively, however not essentially about any particular second. They’re extra like metaphors of time itself.”
There’s at all times a story in her work, however it stays open-ended. It’s the drama of human existence in dialogue with the exterior world that Pade paints. “I don’t need to lure the viewer in a single message. It’s extra like a free exploration on the canvas: an emotional and bodily response that builds its personal logic,” she says.
As soon as the work are introduced outdoors of the studio, they achieve new context from the house and from the individuals who encounter them. In London, Pade needed to choreograph her personal visible rhythm, enthusiastic about how the work might occupy the house virtually like stage units. “The exhibition house was so unconventional that I needed to reply on to its quirks—the staircase, the weird angles—so I started enjoying with composition virtually like orchestration,” she explains. “All of it made sense as a result of the venture was impressed by a ballet, so I leaned into that theatricality, treating the canvases like backdrops.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater however she clearly thinks compositionally, virtually like a stage director. The work are deliberately life-sized so the figures stand in direct relation to the viewer’s physique as they float and dance in these hazy atmospheres, very like in a nightclub or a theater. “I would like the expertise to be bodily, to interrupt the passive distance between viewer and portray.”
Though the works are two-dimensional, they really feel animated by their dense atmospheres, the place our bodies flicker between visibility and occlusion, partially veiled by delicate billows of smoke or lit from inside by a flaming glow or radiant beams of sunshine. Lifting the work off the wall and letting them float via the house isn’t a gimmick; it heightens this emotional rhythm. “For these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures appear to hover or drift in house, and the set up amplifies that impact,” she notes.
Whereas staging the work outdoors her studio, she realized that by not hanging them flat on the wall the viewer might see their backs—the picket stretchers, sketches and uncooked marks behind the floor. They turned residing metaphors for the connection between interior world and exterior house. “I preferred that transparency, that glimpse into course of. Mild handed via them in fascinating methods, giving them a smoldering depth,” she acknowledges. “When folks walked round, the work appeared to maneuver with them. It turned immersive. You might virtually stroll into the composition.”
Within the house, the unified spectral presences of Pade’s choreography discovered their residing essence once more, turning into interlocutors with the viewers. And if portray is, to begin with, an open dialog, an expansive narrative discipline the place everybody can determine and venture their very own meanings, the common energy of connection supplied by Eva Helene Pade’s painterly storytelling and its limitless variations is proof of how her artwork can nonetheless evolve. Even the “failed” works contribute to her evolution, as portray stays for her each a necessity and an urgency, a way to confront and course of the multifaceted actuality of the world. “You be taught approach, rhythm and restraint from them.”
The doubtless steady evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring pleasure for portray. “I don’t plan huge conceptual adjustments. It evolves organically with every new piece,” she displays. “Some work fail; I destroy or cover them in the event that they don’t resonate. I feel it’s essential to be self-critical. A piece that doesn’t transfer me gained’t transfer anybody else.”
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