Help - Have I bricked my MacBook Air?
I fought with an early Air that had been fully wiped by a well-meaning (but clueless!) IT person - he wiped not just the user partition (which I had already erased!) but also erased the reinstall partition. The only thing that worked to fix it was to find an original install image for the computer, place that on a bootable USB drive, and run from there, reformatting the internal drive as HFS+ in the process. If you can see the drive in Disk Utility, you should be able to reformat it.
If the drive WAS converted to apfs, you may need a newer version of Disk Utility to fix the format before you can drop to the Lion installer and start over. Use a bootable drive with macOS High Sierra or Mojave diskutil, dropping to command line to convert back to HFS+.
diskutil list to locate the APFS container
diskutil apfs deleteContainer /dev/disk#s# to kill the APFS container (replace disk#s# with the appropriate disk and partition)
diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ &quot;Disk_Title&quot; /dev/disk# to reformat the now-destroyed APFS container
See here for more detailed info.
After that's done, you should be able to use the Lion installer to see and select the newly-recreated HFS+ partition as the install target.