Simon Martin

William James, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), called it 'the gap that is extremely active'. Simon Martin, in titling his large wall-mounted polychrome relief of a starling, went for the more poetic The Mysterious Suspicion (2001-3), but the two designations refer to the same condition - that frustrating interval when you can't shift a fact from the tip of your tongue to somewhere more useful. Martin's chosen appellate is lifted from René Magritte, and his artwork - as becomes apparent only after a long period of wondering why its gracefully moulded contours and precisely painted rendering of iridescent green-and-purple plumage seem so familiar - is a fairly accurate copy of Star (Starling, 1992), by Martin Honert. Like Sturnus vulgaris, Martin is sometimes a thieving bird; what counts, though, is the gap. Honert hasn't exhibited in London since 1997, when he showed several fowl reliefs in a group show at the old Saatchi Gallery. Shockingly, that's time enough to be forgotten, or at least demoted to the tip of the collective tongue. And so, while The Mysterious Suspicion may be a genre-buster (site-specific appropriation, anyone?) it is also a sympathetic resurrection that deliberately diverts attention away from Martin himself and towards the temporarily unknown.

A failure to recognize the source, however, may only engender a monolithic bemusement that the show's other two works won't allay - that, indeed, their presence only exacerbates. Since both also feature animals, theoretically one could ensnare the show's contents in a web of shared meaning based on characteristics of the natural world. But whatever one rigs up feels like a poor substitute for what's seemingly there - or what isn't, since a work like Monkiness is the Whatness of All Monkey (2000-3) most strongly suggests an adherence to Morse Peckham's analysis of art's function as a risk-free rehearsal of real-world sensations of uncertainty. Monkiness ... is a big white sphere (labelled as 'mixed media' but probably coated fibreglass) into which the face of a cosmically amused chimpanzee has been smoothly sculpted. As your eyes slips across its highly polished surfaces, twanging off the jug-ears and seesawing around the grin without finding acceptable purchase, it's impossible not to be stymied by its malfeasant juxtaposition of iconographies.

Here is how the piece came about: Martin - who used to make Minimalist paintings that didn't offer viewers many toeholds either - began with the idea of creating a perfect white sphere. ('If you have nothing to do and want to meditate and have no inspiration,' declared Willem de Kooning in 1954, 'it might be a good idea to make a sphere.') At some point in the process Martin found a small toy monkey, a child's plaything that, for reasons he can't explain, ended up in the visual mix. But this knowledge doesn't really help - we're still left with the monkey-sphere, undaunted by its contingent and serendipitous origins - and with that long, perhaps fruitful period where, situated in a chamber that all but demands you find meaning, you don't know what the hell you're looking at or why. There's an element of the confidence trickster here: the conman takes your money but leaves you with a smaller burden of innocence; as the price of lightening one's knapsack of institutional piety, Martin asks only for time and a few destroyed synapses.

His lengthy production periods are part of the sting. Does time expended equate automatically to significance? It may be coincidental that the show's least abyssal work, Strawberry Poison Dart Frog (1998-9), took only a year and seems, by such standards, positively rushed, but then Martin did have to learn to paint in a Photorealist style to make it. The image comes from a scientific photograph and, like his homage to Honert, is enlivened by a piece of prior knowledge: that the frog, seen in close-up sitting on a tattered leaf, is livid red as a natural warning - even to touch its skin is fatal for humans. This fact, however, is a McGuffin; something comfortingly empirical to cling to, whose import is nevertheless drowned by the huge and seemingly unnecessary effort that Martin has made to convey it. Yet the effort itself might be the key to his work, since the sum effect of his labours is invariably to remove his own guilty fingerprints from the scene of the crime. As such, the fact that this looked like a show by three mischievous artists - none of whom was Simon Martin - may have been, for him, its most satisfying quality.