With “Les songes de la trame”, Liliane Tomasko transforms the Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Le Corbusier’s final work in France, completed between 1953 and 1960, into a space of dialogue between architecture, abstraction, and inner reflection. The exhibition offers a journey through the artist’s work, bringing together some thirty paintings and works on paper made between 2023 and 2026 within a space where modernist rigour, the orthogonality of lines, and the apparent austerity of concrete are constantly tempered by meticulous attention to detail.
As one moves through the space, the ducting running across the walls in the cardinal hues of modernism—blue, yellow, red, and green—traces lines like an abstraction in space; small concrete niches ornament a corridor; long vertical openings, like modern arrow slits, punctuate the interior spaces; while stones with organic contours greet us at the entrance. All these details and subtle modulations of matter allow, to borrow the words of Henri Michaux, “another life in the folds” of the architecture to emerge.
It is precisely within these interstices that the dialogue with Liliane Tomasko’s painting unfolds. At first glance, the Swiss painter’s canvases command attention with their abstract power; they are monumental and shimmering, traversed by gestural energy and colours of rare intensity. Yet her painting, far from presenting itself as mere expansion or spectacular surface, springs from an inner impulse. It is born of an attention to ordinary fragments, to the folds of textiles, drapery, rumpled fabrics, and details that only the artist seems to see. Thus, in the context of the convent, Liliane Tomasko’s paintings invite us to look differently: no longer just head-on, but into its corners, recesses, and thresholds.
The exhibition is structured as a journey centred on the number three, in an echo of the Trinity and the spiritual vocation of the site. Several ensembles bring together three paintings, or multiples of three, forming constellations in which the works enter into dialogue with one another like so many variations, apparitions, or successive visions, akin to those moments we feel we have already lived, without knowing whether they belong to a dream or a vague memory. This ternary structure is not merely a formal principle; it engages us in an experience of painting as passage, as meditation, as a slow crossing from the visible to the invisible. In Liliane Tomasko’s work, the motif is never given all at once. It emerges, withdraws, transforms. The folds of a fabric, the table napkins of the friars she has photographed, and the silent fragments of domestic life become the starting points for a vibrant abstraction in which reality is displaced.
In this respect, Liliane Tomasko’s work resonates deeply with the spirit of the Couvent de La Tourette. In this building designed for communal life, prayer, study, and retreat, the most concrete material becomes a vehicle for spiritual elevation. Painting, like architecture, does not escape the world; rather, it intensifies its hidden qualities. As the American art critic Joseph Masheck writes in The Carpet Paradigm, “Art has spiritual value, not because it can be used to escape… reality but because in displacing only a little of the world it can implicate the world so generally. Painting is an ornament of life because, as at best in the ‘applied’ or decorative arts themselves, it magnifies qualities already present in the material life and world.”
“Les songes de la trame” thus offers both an interpretation of Liliane Tomasko’s work and a reinterpretation of the space that hosts it. In the tension between cold rationalism and the sensuality of the pictorial gesture, between monumentality and detail, between abstraction and material memory, this exhibition reminds us that the spiritual is not found outside the world, but within its very depth—in the folds, the traces, the textures, the repeated gestures, and the modest fragments to which the artist offers a new life.
