In London, Thaddaeus Ropac is hosting the first solo exhibition in the UK by Danish artist Eva Helene Pade. A masterful plunge into a world of frenzied crowds, where the female body becomes a collective language of violence and seduction.

There is something both unsettling and alluring in Eva Helene Pade's paintings, like a dance that wavers between embrace and jostling. With Søgelys (literally "projectors"), the Danish-born, Paris-based artist directs a choreography of bodies wracked with tension, suspended between harsh light and swirls of smoke. The monumental canvases, erected on metal poles that detach them from the walls, force the viewer to move around, to slip among them, as if inside a collective drama.

In her crowds of figures saturated with reds and ochres, the feminine dominates. But far from a gaze that freezes and fetishizes, Pade treats her characters as "emotional palettes," vehicles of affect. Their bodies dissolve, metamorphose, collide, and are consumed by the pictorial matter. Faces blur, lips fade, gestures become fragments of narrative, suspended on the edge of abstraction. What Pade foregrounds is not the individual but the power of the collective, this shared tumult where the contours of the self dissolve in a spontaneous gesture.

The omnipresent smoke acts as a metaphor: it blurs outlines, makes scenes uncertain, and establishes a muted threat. Skygge over mængden (Shadow over the crowd), a winged silhouette emerges above a charred mass, bathed in a brilliant yellow sky, while beams of spotlights sweep across the canvas like inquisitive eyes. These beams, which give the exhibition its title, transform in turn into electric currents, shards of swords, and medieval spears reminiscent of Paolo Uccello.

Reminiscences of art history, revisited mythologies, echoes of history painting and Diego Rivera's murals: in Pade's work, each figure seems trapped in an immemorial cycle of fall and rebirth. His crowds become parables of a troubled present, simultaneously traversed by ecstasy and the threat of collapse.

“Søgelys”
Thaddaeus Ropac Ely House
37 Dover Street, London (England)
Until November 22, 2025

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