The premise of this exhibition is that to paint is to dwell in a very foreign language. “Painting” has a semiotic system, a grammar, and those are as fixed as they are changing. Artists may try to express ideas – like “the human form”, for example – in that second idiom, sometimes conforming to its turn of phrase, sometimes giving rise to altogether new concepts.

Saville tries to do both. She shapes her figures – larger than life, often female, and adorned in blemishes, fractures, sex – as the grammatical subjects in a tongue of violent morphology. But she also suggests, unwittingly but in contradiction, that the ferocity of her paint is not a given but a dialect.

Catching her work in its various states of composition (rather than decomposition, as one may imagine of, say, Bacon’s) suggests that the sexy brutality which Saville applies to her subjects is one step away from an affectation. There is no trace of the visceral in her gentle pencil studies, for example. The recent glitch paintings, likewise, are developments of a method. A translator might wonder, therefore, about the veracity of Saville’s native-tongue source story.