Flora Temnouche: “reality is spam”

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present “reality is spam,” our first exhibition with Parisian painter Flora Temnouche, which also marks her United States solo debut. The exhibition will be on view from January 18 to February 8 in Los Angeles.

Temnouche’s paintings are rooted in a close observation of her immediate surroundings. Rejecting artificial setups, she paints by daylight, capturing what surrounds her in her apartment-studio: a cut melon on her countertop, wilting flowers on her studio floor, even her own reflection. This approach requires a sharp attention to the nuances of her environment—the way sunlight shifts across a surface, how a discarded rag falls, or how arrangements of objects shape a sense of place and mood. Her works hold the traces of such fleeting moments and their atmospheres, balancing their ephemerality with the quasi-permanence of the canvas.

As we acquaint ourselves with Temnouche’s environment, and therefore with the artist herself, certain motifs recur. Winter Studio and Studio Table with Tulips explore the shifting tonalities of daylight within a single space, while Still Life with Paper Towel and Roses and Roses chart various stages in a bouquet’s decay. But Temnouche’s paintings extend beyond straightforward depictions of daily life and her own relationship to her living space; they also allegorize the act of painting itself. A table in one composition Studio Table with Tulips, for instance doubles as a palette, emphasizing the physical and conceptual processes behind her work.

Throughout, Temnouche cultivates a stillness and solitude in her still lives and portraits, evoking the introspective quietude of Gwen John by way of Giorgio Morandi. Her surfaces, prepared with gesso and marble dust and sometimes sanded, have a worn, hazy quality that makes the works themselves feel older than they actually are, a quasi-antiquarian veneer. Temnouche therefore siphons a cool, archaic beauty from mundane moments, using a soft color palette, delicate light, and rich textures to conjure the fugue-like state of memories or daydreams. Her works evoke the poignant sensation of being absorbed in a single thought or image, suspended in the fleeting moment just before it fades into the next.