“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka

There is a quiet presence in Flora Temnouche’s restrained, bleached interiors, where the artist’s depiction of habitual, domestic environments imbues the everyday with brimming reverence.

Temnouche’s compositions depict quotidian objects, expansive interiors, and psychological self-portraits, lending a subjective mode to her paintings. The artist lives closely with her work, painting the incidental accumulation of her belongings as they accrete over time. Floorboards and plaster cornicing, radiators and shroud-like curtains frame quiet corners of her flat, lending the compositions the feeling of tableaus yet to be entered: a shirt hung expectantly, a grapefruit, split to be eaten, figures stood with pause. These compositions create a sentience within the works, making the habitual strangely unfamiliar with her careful use of detail and staging. Bright windows and open, expectant, doorways create an unexpected expansiveness, sitting discordantly alongside a resounding solitude within the paintings.

Working in oil on canvas primed with gesso, marble dust, and rabbit glue, Temnouche refers to her compositions as a kind of ‘secular altar’,¹ with each object at once commonplace, yet imbued with singular significance. An equivalence can be seen between Temnouche’s humble realism and the work of Israel Hersberg, whose use of detail and study of the solitary lends² his paintings an unplaceable ennui and spiritual simplicity. Where Hershberg’s paintings, and particularly, his more realistic figuration, connote Roland Barthe’s understanding of the ‘amorous or funereal immobility’³ in photography – a strange temporal suspension where presence is transformed into memory – Temnouche’s ability to depict stillness and solitude also creates an ambiguous temporality.

Speaking about her work, the artist links her preoccupation with the ritualism of the everyday to an ancient fascination with domesticity. Not only is there a direct visual equivalence between Temnouche’s brushy application of paint and the attrited surfaces of Pompeiian fresco fragments, but the Roman tradition of the Unswept Floor⁴ – a custom where scraps of food were thrown to the ground after opulent banquets, thought of as gifts to the dead⁵ – is a motif of particular fascination for the artist. Where this spectre of death within the everyday was immortalised in mosaic floors in Roman houses, Temnouche’s work also leans towards the ascetic, with pared-back interiors immortalising the simple, humble and authentic, laden with an other-worldy yearning.

Temnouche draws particular influence from the work of Avigdor Arikha⁶, the Romanian-born French–Israeli painter, whose psychological portraits, restrained palette, and use of thinning, dry brushwork resounds throughout Temnouche’s work. The influence is especially clear in the artist’s Self Portrait, a direct reference to Arikha’s own⁷. In both works, the canvas dominates the picture plane with self-referential impulse. Much like Arikha, Temnouche returns repeatedly to the self, though she remarks that each self-portrait feels unfamiliar, as if the painted figures have assumed their own identities. In the artist’s self-portrait, the exposed stretcher bars of the canvas being painted also have latent religious symbolism – implying both the crucifix and coffin.

Throughout the works, figures can be glimpsed walking, reclining, pausing, much like the furtive solitude of American painter Danielle Mckinney’s practice⁸. Replete with figures unaware they are being observed, McKinney’s subjects rest, drift, and retreat behind objects. In both practices, there is an implied displacement of the self, where interior psychology spills into domestic space⁹: Subjects drift through rooms like characters in a story whose plot remains ambiguous.

Temnouche’s depiction of solitude falls within a tradition of women representing themselves in closed, interior spaces. Much like the fragile presence at play within Francesca Woodman’s photography¹⁰, figures in Temnouche’s work appear and disappear, as if perpetually walking from one room to the next. The artist’s process, using layers to slowly build her compositions, adds to this ghostly presence, with earlier versions remaining ghostly implications in the finished paintings, the only evidence of their presence being a laminous build up of gesso at the works edges, creating a fittingly ambiguous periphery. Here, a tension between liberty and confinement, expression and concealment, lingers.

Written by Lydia Earthy