Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
The police may have said no to firing gunshots into the walls, but Le Va’s retrospective still invites viewers to take a walk on the wild side

The gallery is quiet. Perhaps too quiet. I can’t hear the gunshots or the sledgehammer. The bullet-holes peppering the wall, the glass smashed on the floor and the taped-off area by the doorway, demarcated “Slow Death”, are all a kind of evidence, but of what? Watch where you tread. Mind those ball-bearings and the vicious looking shards by your feet. And what about the chemical symbols and the diagrams, and the missing vanishing point? What’s with all that white powder? Do we need an art critic or forensics?

Barry Le Va liked the idea that the viewer should approach his work as a detective might, to figure out what he had done. But we’re not all Sherlock Holmes. The idea of the artwork as a puzzle to be solved has never interested me much. Once you’ve found the solution, you might well walk away and never return. If we keep going back, it is for other reasons.