Art reviews: Barry Le Va | Gabrielle Goliath | Guadalupe Maravilla

The Barry Le Va retrospective at the Fruitmarket helps us understand how modernism evolved, writes Susan Mansfield

Installation view of Barry Le Va: In a State of Flux at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh | Neil Hanna

Barry Le Va: In a state of flux, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★

Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★

Guadalupe Maravilla: Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones) Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★

The name of Barry Le Va is not particularly well known in the UK, apart from among certain contemporary artists, who light up at the mention of it. That suggests we should know something about him, and this retrospective at the Fruitmarket offers a valuable chance to do a bit of catching up.

Le Va grew up in California, but moved to New York - the crucible of the avant-garde - in the 1960s, where he became associated with postminimalism and process art. This show, curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll of Kunstmuseum Liechenstein, is the first major exhibition of his work since his death in 2021 aged 79, and the result of considerable research. Staging Le Va, you see, without Le Va himself, is something of a challenge. 

The works in the downstairs gallery at the Fruitmarket, mainly from the late 1960s, sit somewhere between sculpture and performance. Often, a work began with a dynamic action by the artist, never publicly witnessed: a sheet of glass being smashed, a shot being fired, a cleaver being embedded in a wall. The audience, he suggested, would be like detectives at a crime scene, working out how the works were made. 

At the same time, Le Va is a curious mix of spontaneity and precision. He studied mathematics and architecture before he became an artist and both come through in his drawings in which he mapped out his ideas, always from above, like architectural plans, often using mathematical patterns which lay beneath his apparent randomness.

Installation view of the Barry Le Va exhibition at the Fruitmarket | Neil Hanna

His was an art of experimentation: objects were placed, dropped or thrown, as if he was studying the difference between the three. When he made collages and prints, he restricted himself to a precise lexicon of shapes and experimented to see how many variations he could make. In the latest works here, made in the years just before his death, he mapped the chemical formulae for certain drugs as if trying to understand how they worked.

Strangely, the largest work in the show, Accumulated Vision: Series II (1977) sits outside this pattern. It’s quiet and delicate, an arrangement of three-dimensional lines and shapes on the walls and floor, which leaves one feeling as if one had stepped into a drawing, more stillness than dynamism.

If minimalism was a kind of full-stop in art, Le Va helps us understand what came after. He absorbed an art of hard-edged abstraction, then disrupted it. There are few straight lines in this show, little that is monumental. Where there is a straight line, as in Right Angular Section (On a Diagonal), which seems to redraw the dimensions of the room, it is made with white chalk dust, naturally ephemeral. When he used bricks, he dropped them in untidy piles while walking, as if challenging the formality of artists like Carl Andre.

Like Gordon Matta-Clark or Fred Sandback, he turned abstraction into something more playful, ephemeral, uncertain. What, after all, is the work? he seemed to ask. Is it in the process, or the aftermath? And if it is in the process, what is the status of the work when the artist is no longer here?

Given the interest in process versus product in art today, and in design versus accident, it’s not hard to see why some contemporary artists love Barry Le Va. However, rather than appearing contemporary, his works feel like they belong to the time in which they were made. Seeing them helps us understand how certain trends in modernism evolved, up to and including work being made today. 

Installation view of Personal Accounts by Gabrielle Goliath | Courtesy of Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

To Talbot Rice, then, which is currently hosting two solo exhibitions. In Personal Accounts, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath presents several multi-screen video works which use the same modus operandi, a version of which was shown at this year’s Venice Biennale. The biggest is Mango Blossoms, made in Edinburgh, a series of portraits of “survivors” who are women, queer and non-binary people and people of colour.

Goliath’s approach is to film them talking about their lives and what survival means to them, then edit out the speech, leaving a jerky residue of gestures and hesitations, ems and ums, sniffs and sighs. There’s a river of birds in migration was made in the same way in Johannesburg with four trans people, and Lago di Como with nine women living and working among the luxury resorts of Northern Italy, all users of an anti-violence helpline.

Deinde Falase features three films of the Nigerian television anchor to whom it fell to announce the country’s new laws criminalising same-sex relationships. Later, he came out publicly himself and moved to South Africa but, ten years on, is still an asylum seeker without a work permit.

It’s all beautifully filmed and installed, filling the whole gallery with an immersive percussion of human sounds. How successful it is for you depends on what you think about the premise: has Goliath hit on a perfect way to express things which are hard to talk about, which speak across the boundaries of languages and cultures while protecting the people who are her subjects?

Does this forced inarticulacy create compassion, or is it actually disempowering, a further silencing of those whose stories are already marginalised? The sense of the latter is particularly acute in Falase’s case, because his story is told in outline in the wall text, and doubtless he has the skills to tell it well. To let him speak - to let all of them speak - would that not be more powerful?

Installation view of the Guadalupe Maravilla exhibition at Talbot Rice showing Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones) | Courtesy of Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. Photo: Sally Jubb Photography

There is more sound in the Georgian Gallery, which hosts the first Scottish exhibition by the El Salvador-born artist Guadelupe Maravilla. Central to his work is his story, his arrival in the US aged eight as an unaccompanied refugee fleeing the civil war in El Salvador. He believes the internalised trauma of this led to his diagnosis with colon cancer as an adult, and he has spent years researching indigenous healing traditions, particularly those involving sound.

Dominating the Georgian Gallery are two totemic Disease Throwers, facing one another down the middle of the hall. These deities each bear a gong on which the artist played during a Sound Bath Experience the night before the opening. They are impressive objects, festooned with dried flowers, woven reeds, loofah plants and painted wooden snakes.

Much of Maravilla’s work is made in collaboration with indigenous craftspeople and much of it is impressive: Retablos - devotional paintings - on one side of the room, backpacks sculpted from volcanic ash on the other. Even the wall paintings, inspired by the traditional game Tripa Chuca are by a Edinburgh-based Salvadorian, Susy Cruz.

There are woven hammocks strung high above as a “place of rest for ancestors”, sequined embroideries and another immersive soundtrack of pan pipes, tinkling bells and something low and earthy like a didgeridoo. It feels several different exhibitions at once. That said, one might enjoy it more if one was allowed to appreciate it as an exhibition without being encouraged to buy into the sound-is-healing ideology. And if they turned the music down a bit.

Barry Le Va until 2 February; Gabrielle Goliath and Guadalupe Maravilla until 15 February