Youth Will Always Win

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.

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23 rue Charlot

Paris, NY