Ridiculously beautiful … relforiotopear: These are the adjectives that come to mind when looking at the paintings of Eva Helene Pade. Amorphous bodies move across the canvas as a choreography for the audience dancers, taking over the beautiful gallery of Thaddaeus Ropac in London. It is an exhibition of various energies, where the power of attraction and seduction of the femme fatale finds its stage, expressed through Moody, moving the atmosphere shaped by feelings of color and natural emotional reactions.
Following the debut of the Paris-based design at the Arken Museum of Arteporary Art in Denmark earlier this year and new auction records in Hong Kong in 2024, where Story to be told # 14 . The body is examined here as an experiential medium and filter, a porous psychical, cognitive and emotional membrane through which we negotiate cooperation and relationships with others. The painting becomes a vehicle for the continuous exercise of adding women up and down, creating a dance and tension from within the canvas and the surrounding area. “Colour is natural to me; it’s emotional and mental,” says the thinker. “Palette often defines the state of the work before the figures appear.”
Pade turns the canvas into a stage of life where color and movement stand at the automatic station and interpret the expressions of the distribution of the human psyche. His process is very logical: Values come from the Law of Drawing itself, start with an abstract field and go through a process of identification and classification. “I begin to draw figures on it. At first, they appear as small flowers, and little by little I begin to press them until the forms begin to take shape, only,” said. Pade is also rhythmic, listening to classical music to enter the inner world of the narrative and transform its original stories into a tool to deal with universal questions about the human condition.
“I work very naturally, I allow the development to lead. Sometimes it fails; Sometimes it is surprising that his influences have changed over time, although they always influence him. The psychological charge of his work recalls the placement of emotional and psychological artists such as Edvard Munch, Amber Hellmann, Cecily Brown, the black masters, revealing how much emotion can be conveyed through action or emotion.
However, despite this accurate transference in pigment and color, Pade’s works are never autobiographical portraits; they are a real person but not a real one. “I don’t copy people in my life, and I don’t use photo references. They are precise, almost push images that come out and change as I work,” he explained.
Like Monsters or ghosts starting again from the understanding, these sharp structures investigate the poly diaphragm between the inner and outer world, the border that revealed the painting. “I’ve always been drawn to painting. I started painting as a way to process external reality and my inner world,” said Pade. He never had a strong academic training, so he taught himself anatomy, proportion and form, which is probably why its figures appear slowly, they exist within his visual mind. “That was my language.”
The canvas becomes a stage where the “shadow,” removed, “faces a different concept of Fredian and Jungian. “I keep shaping the space, working on the surface, I draw new things because of the shadows I didn’t see,” affirms Pade. “The black color can create a sign or a pattern, which I push back into the design.” It is a long, set process that involves a lot of waiting and letting the paint dry as it finds discovery and transformation.
However, it is immediately apparent upon entering the exhibition that this new body of work grapples with femininity, feeling and the position of the female body in space. Painting is his way of exploring the relationship between the self and the environment, how this subtly contaminates and reduces the identity between body and soul, between the many and the many. His figures, often prominent and flawless, convey emotions through action and contradiction, and harmony with a moving power that surpasses any autobiographical reading.
What he paints is something that can be an orchestra that can be a cacophonos of feelings and voices, a conflict and chaos in humanity where victims are humiliated and rediscovered. Pade began to paint crowds during the lockdown, reflecting the collective isolation typical of the time. “They’re pictures of people together, but not really about any particular time. They’re like metaphors for time itself.”
It is always narrative in his paintings, but it is always open. It is a drama of human existence in dialogue with the outside world. “I don’t want to tie the viewer to one message. It’s like free exploration on the canvas: the emotional and physical response that creates has its own meaning,” he said.
When the paintings are presented outside the studio, they get a new context from the space and the feelings of the people who experience them. In London, Pade wanted to fill his visual rhythm, imagining how the paintings could inhabit the space almost like a stage set. “The exhibition space was so inconsistent that I had to respond directly to its quirks – stairs, unusual angles – so I started to play with construction almost like installing inchestina,” he explains. “It all made sense because the project was inspired by ballet, so I leaned into that area, treating the canvases as a backdrop.”
Pade doesn’t have a background in theater but thinks well of the part, almost like a stage director. The paintings are personified so that the figures stand parallel to the viewer’s body as they float and dance in these nocturnal or theatrical flowers. “I want the experience to be physical, to break the distance between the viewer and the painting.”
Although the works are two analysts, they feel that they have their dense conditions, where the bedsies move between visibility and Occlusion, partially detected by smoke or illuminated by flow or bright light. Lifting paintings from the wall and letting them float in space is not a gimmick; It increases this emotional rhythm. “In these crowd scenes, it made sense. The figures seem to be moving around in space, and the installation amplifies that effect,” he notes.
While tying the paintings outside his studio, he realized that by not being confident on the wall the viewer can see their bags – sketches, sketches and raw marks behind the face. They become living metaphors for the relationship between the inner world and the outer world. “I liked the transparency, the approach. The light came through them in interesting ways, giving them more depth,” he admits. “When people walked around, the paintings seemed to go with them. It became MyMiverive. You can almost walk into the design.”
In the space, the clay principles of Pade’s Choreography find their creativity again, becoming interlocuutors and viewers. And if painting is, first of all, an open conversation, a wide narrative field where everyone can see and gain its meanings, its diversity that is offered, its infinite diversity is proof of how its infinite art is still evolving. Even the “Failed” works contribute to its evolution, as painting remains dependent on both his need and urgency, a way of dealing with and processing the reality of the collective world. “You learn the technique, the rhythm and the blocking from them.”
The continuous evolution of the canvases on view reveals Pade’s enduring joy in painting. “I’m not planning big conceptual changes. It’s literally coming out with each new piece,” it shows. “Some paintings fail; I destroy them or hide them if they don’t fit together. I think it’s important to criticize yourself.”
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