YOUTH WILL ALWAYS WIN | "YOUTH WILL ALWAYS WIN"

Press release

Two painters, both under twenty-five, both working with the body, both drawn to the moment just before or just after something happens. The comparison writes itself — which is exactly why it needs to be handled carefully. Fortunately, Youth Will Always Win earns it.

Jesse Zuo, born in Beijing in 2000 and now based in New York, paints women she knows. Friends, mostly. Herself, occasionally. The situations are unremarkable: someone adjusting a strap, lying across a bed, caught in the particular flatness of afternoon light. What makes the paintings work is what she leaves out. Zuo crops aggressively — a shoulder here, a waist, the hem of something — and the effect isn't coy. It's proprietary. These moments belonged to someone before they became paintings, and Zuo doesn't let you forget it.

Her oil surfaces are careful without being labored, and her color shifts register like mood rather than description — a sudden warm tone that has no obvious source, a shadow that reads more like unease than shadow. You don't leave her work thinking about technique. You leave thinking about the person who wasn't quite looking back.

Tess Mallavergne is twenty-one and still studying at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. Youth Will Always Win is her first public show, which is either a pressure or a freedom — her paintings suggest she's treating it as the latter. Where Zuo works from life, Mallavergne works from images of images: personal photographs, but increasingly stills taken directly from film and television, phone pressed to screen, light captured twice over.

The result is painting that doesn't pretend to be something other than what it is. Pixelation stays pixelated. Compression blur doesn't get smoothed away. A scene from a film arrives on canvas still carrying the particular blue of a backlit monitor. This could easily become a gimmick — the knowing wink at digital mediation — but Mallavergne is more interested in what these degraded images hold emotionally than in the fact of their degradation. She crops too, but differently from Zuo: less to protect, more to isolate. A secondary figure. A limb at the edge of a frame. The scene you weren't supposed to be looking at.

Both artists are drawn to latency — the suspended beat where the image refuses to tell you what it's about. In Zuo, that suspension feels intimate, almost anxious. In Mallavergne, it's cooler, more cinematic, haunted by the sense that the original image was already a performance.

The title, Youth Will Always Win, is blunter than the work it introduces. It doesn't quite fit, which might be the point. Neither of these painters is making work about youth — they're making work about attention, and thresholds, and what painting can still do with a fragment. That they're both twenty-something feels incidental until you realize it probably isn't. There's a shared instinct here about what's worth looking at and what's worth withholding. Whether that's generational or just a good pairing is the more interesting question, and the exhibition is smart enough not to answer it.

Two Painters at the Start of Something
There's a particular kind of attention that defines the best emerging painting right now — partial, restless, unwilling to explain itself. Youth Will Always Win brings together two artists who have it.

Jesse Zuo, 24, New York. Tess Mallavergne, 21, Paris. Between them: a combined practice that touches figuration, intimacy, and the image-saturated present without ever feeling like it's making a point about any of those things. Zuo's oil paintings carry the quiet authority of someone who has already found her subject matter and knows exactly how close to let you get. Mallavergne, in her first exhibition, shows a painter already thinking seriously about where images come from, what they lose in transit, and what painting can recover.

Both artists bring institutional grounding — Zuo's New York-based practice is developing within one of the most competitive environments for figurative painting today; Mallavergne is completing her studies at the ENSBA Lyon, one of France's leading fine art schools. The Paris–New York axis of this pairing is not incidental: it reflects two geographies where the conversation around painting is most alive right now.

Both are under twenty-five. Both are at the very beginning of trajectories that will be followed closely. Works are deliberately accessible — this is a rare window into practices that won't stay under the radar long.

Jesse Zuo (b. 2000, Beijing)
Jesse is a painter living and working in New York. Working primarily in oil, she makes figurative paintings drawn from her immediate circle — intimate in scale and psychological in register. Her work gravitates toward the private moment: the gesture half-completed, the body partly visible, the interior charged with quiet ambiguity. Zuo's practice positions painting as a form of sustained attention to the people she knows best, and to the distance that remains even between them. Youth Will Always Win is her first exhibition in Europe.

Tess Mallavergne (b. 2004, Paris)
Tess is a painter currently completing her studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. Her paintings originate in an expanding archive of found and personal imagery — photographs from her own life as well as stills captured directly from film and television screens. Working in oil, she translates these layered, degraded images onto canvas without neutralizing their digital qualities: blur, pixelation, and the particular light of a monitor all persist in the finished work. Mallavergne's paintings are drawn to the latent moment, the suspended interval between actions, the image that suggests a narrative it refuses to complete. Youth Will Always Win is her first public exhibition.