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

There is something both disturbing and appealing about Eva Helene Pade's painting, like a dance that hesitates between embrace and jostling. With Søgelys (literally "spotlights"), the Danish-born, Paris-based artist directs a choreography of bodies riddled with tension, suspended between harsh light and swirls of smoke. The monumental canvases, mounted on metal poles that lift them off the walls, force the viewer to circulate, to slip between them, as if inside a collective drama.

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

The smoke, omnipresent, acts as a metaphor: it blurs the contours, renders the scenes uncertain, and creates a sense of underlying menace. In Skygge over mængden (Shadow over the Crowd), a winged silhouette rises above a charred mass, bathed in a bright yellow sky, while beams of light sweep across the canvas like inquisitive eyes. These rays, which give the exhibition its title, are transformed in turn into electric currents, sword flashes, and medieval spears reminiscent of Paolo Uccello.

Reminiscent of art history, revisited mythologies, memories of historical painting and Diego Rivera's murals: in Pade's work, each figure seems trapped in an age-old cycle of decline and rebirth. His crowds become parables of a troubled present, simultaneously swept up in ecstasy and threatened with collapse.

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

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