Martin Naylor
Serpentine Galleries
In Martin Naylor’s work meaning emerges from the gaps between words, objects, and paintings. His has been a lengthy pursuit, with a repertoire of symbols—a chair, a knife, a black cloth, the outline of a house, an embracing couple—employed time and again in a series called “Between Discipline and Desire,” 1977–86, so long a series by now that sub-, even sub-subtitles are employed to distinguish separate works. The stiffness of the drawing; the clumsy translatorese of the sentences, with their jerky, unliterary quality at odds with their poetic intent; and the insistent disjunction between parts