The title of Daniel Firman’s first large museum show, “La Matière Grise” (Gray Matter), was both a reference and a provocation. The artist has used the phrase before, notably in a life-size self-portrait sculpture from 2009 titled Grey Matters, (not in the show), which illustrates the proverbial weight of the world by replacing the artist’s head with a cyclonic jumble of gray industrial and domestic objects. Expanding the title to encompass six years of work, the Lyon survey showed Firman using physical gray matter (namely clay, metal, resin, and painted plaster) to evoke more abstract outputs