Lise Thiollier — La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec
Salt, Earth, Time. Three elements that traverse and structure the exhibition Metamorphoses of Salt by Lise Thiollier, presented at La Galerie, contemporary art center of Noisy-le-Sec. Crystallized sculptures, immersive structures, and sound installations weave a delicate narrative on the transformation of matter, the fragility of ecosystems, and the invisible shifts in the world around us.
Lise Thiollier — Métamorphoses de sel @ La Galerie - Centre d’art contemporain from February 1 to April 26. Learn more As it started in 2022 during a residency in Chile, Lise Thiollier’s research explores lithium, an element omnipresent in our daily lives, from psychiatric medicine to industry. The Atacama Desert and the Allier french district become the magnetic poles of a documented and inventive artistic investigation that questions the exploitation and depletion of natural resources in a century where they redefine geopolitics as well as the very identity of populations.At the center of the exhibition stands an emblematic sculpture: Desobedecio, a ceramic piece immersed in a salt bath, reinterpreting the myth of Lot’s wife (who, in the Bible, was turned into a pillar of salt) through a regenerative lens. This slow crystallization process evokes transformation and resilience—a central theme of an exhibition that embraces care and repair without imposing a singular vision. Like the uncertain reflection of the visitor, shifting and elusive in the monumental mirror made of discarded black smartphone screens.
The figure of the flamingo, exiled from the Atacama Desert, emerges as a symbol of the ecological disruptions caused by 20th-century industry. Reactivated through minimalist modeling, it highlights the essential organic dimension necessary to grasp technological and industrial challenges—just as the artist’s textile installations also explore material connections between nature and industry. The interwoven smartphone nets contain tiny traces of gold, recalling the links between mineral extraction and colonialism. A poetics of remnants and fragments takes shape, each piece bearing witness to the interactions between the environment and human history.
The exhibition is also a space for rest and contemplation. Mud-plastered armchairs invite visitors to listen attentively, to reconnect with the earth as a foundation. Books and articles available in a thematic library intertwine with the sounds of the desert to extend the reflection. The eye of feathers, a sculpture inspired by the pineal gland, questions perception and biological cycles, echoing lithium’s role in regulating emotions and sleep. In the photography room, time becomes blurred. Superimposed images, interwoven temporalities, memories crystallized in salt… Lise Thiollier offers an experience of cyclical time, calling for a recomposition of one’s own existence through a disruption of repetition. Temporal aberrations transform into clues of an ongoing intensity to be discovered: archival photographs of places she will later explore, an old-fashioned postcard, a sculpture of a spinning top suspended in motion, reassembled debris and waste—all attributing value to a tangible present.
Through creation, allegory, and the layering of emotions—of looking, learning, and the very practice of sculpture—Thiollier develops a politics of invention and presence, entangling temporal and spatial distance while playing with symbols and forms.
Because ultimately, this is all about sculpture. As historically charged as it is rich in energetic potential, and as a medium shaping even our most intimate thoughts through its presence in smartphones, lithium is first and foremost the component of a material—a material that only exists in compound form. Time, in turn, both decomposes and recomposes a landscape that Thiollier’s visions fragment by multiplying associations of ideas and forms, modes of thought and representation.
In this way, this first monographic exhibition opens a window onto ongoing transformations and provides a framework—if not a foundation, since everything here continually returns to the time of sculpture, to the resonances between natural transformations and human upheavals, between the transformation of gesture and the disruption of time.
