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SCOTLAND’S STRONGEST SHOWING AT THE BIENNALE IN YEARS IS CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION. BUT SHOULD WE BE SENDING MORE ESTABLISHED ARTISTS TO REPRESENT US AT THE ART WORLD’S OLYMPICS?

There are wines that do not travel - drink them in the sunshine and they are delicious; take them home and they have lost all their magic. Art is a bit like that. You can take artists abroad who are celebrities at home and suddenly they seem very ordinary indeed. That is the challenge of the Venice Biennale: make your home-grown art seem meaningful to people not familiar with it.

It is the biggest art fair in the world. Every nation, small or large, is striving for attention for its artists. Scotland really only joined this artistic bedlam six years ago, however, and the first two shows were not distinguished. For this third attempt, the Scottish Arts Council, the British Council and the National Galleries of Scotland have worked closely. The venue is the Palazzo Zenobio, an attractive place with a big garden. The curator is Philip Long of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, and so, instead of being a rather random freelance excercise as it was disastrously last time, the show is part of the National Galleries’ outreach.

Long has chosen six artists: Charles Avery, Henry Coombes, Louise Hopkins, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lucy Skaer and Tony Swain. Unusually, Charles Avery is actually Scottish - the other five are all imports to this country. Evidently that does not disqualify him, however. Even more surprisingly, Avery did not do the Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art course as the other five artists showing this year have done, along with the great majority of the 30 or so artists who have represented Scotland in other Biennales. It is beginning to look like a monopoly. Be that as it may Philip Long has made his choice.

Each of the artists has a room to themselves. The first you come to is Charles Avery. The most oddball of an oddball group, he is engaged on a vast project, creating a strange Tolkien-esque world out of drawings and texts. Everything he does is a small part of what he describes as an encyclopedia, an attempt to describe in detail a whole imaginary world. He conceived it gazing at the horizon, a place you can see but never reach. It could have been the rainbow.

In the age of virtual reality, it is rather touching that he has undertaken to do all this in old-fashioned drawings. But they are remarkable. For instance, there is a large one here of a marketplace in his imaginary world, as full of incident as that celebrated Victorian masterpiece, William Frith’s ‘The Railway Station’. There is a complicated mythology associated with all this too - a nest of bearded cobras represents one of the inumerable island gods. It is all quite daft, but rather charming.

Lucy Skaer also draws, but her drawings are more obsessional than fanciful. They consist entirely of small spirals, drawn freehand in little, contiguous pencil squares, like the tesserae in a mosaic. She varies the tone by varying the size of the squares. Her room is dominated by two large drawings done in this extraordinary fashion. Both are on loose scrolls of paper and are apparently unfininshed - or perhaps they can never be finished. If you look at them for a while you will see that one reproduces Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ on the scale of an actual wave; the other shows part of the skeleton of a whale, likewise life-size. She has also found similar patterns to those she deploys in her drawings in mother-of-pearl and has inlaid a magnificent set of pearly teeth in the top of an antique mahogany table. It is very decorative and much less costly than Damien Hirst’s kitsch skull whch it rather resembles.

Rosalind Nashashibi is perhaps the best known of these artists - she is also the most disappointing here, but perhaps that is not surprising. Success very often leads to the expectation that the world will find everything interesting that the artist does, just because she does it. Here Nashashibi displays a random collection of photographs of book covers and the like. She also has an equally random film about men on a ship. It is one of those awful artist’s films which nobody in their right mind would ever watch unless thay had to. Half of it was enough for me.

Louise Hopkins, like Lucy Skaer, seems to be obssessed by patterns and explores them through drawing. Typically she takes a piece of wallpaper or fabric decorated in the style of 18th-century flowered chintz or toile de jour and works the repeated pattern back into the vivid image it might once have been. In her best drawings the result is very powerful.

Tony Swain makes collages that are reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s works in the early 1960’s. He works on sheets of newspaper, both with layers of more paper and with paint. He exploits with skill the possibilities of collage, it’s capacity to make unexpected associations and connections, and so his images do have a strong presence, but it is all too familiar to startle anyone in Venice.

Henry Coombes makes powerful little black-and-white drawings. They remind me a bit of Goya in their mood and also in execution, but his subject matter often has more to do with Landseer - Coombes frequently draws deer and wolves, for instance. He has also made a film. Self-effacingly, he shows it not in a darkened room where you have to obediently sit and watch it, but on a screen in the wall alongside his drawings and much the same size as them. It is a surrealist take on a gralloching - the disembowelling of a deer - and it puts the blood and guts back into Landseer’s santised vision of “sport”.

Altogether it is an intriguing show. But will this art travel? Will it find a public in Venice? I am not sure. It is all very inward-looking - perhaps there is nowhere else for art to go, nowadays, and so it will strike a nerve, but the competition out there is very strong. If you want obsessional like Lucy Skaer, for instance, Masao Okabe in the Japanese Pavillion has been taking rubbings on paper of the stones of a former railway platform at Hiroshima for years. That is the sort of competition our artists face. There is very little that has not been done bigger and better somewhere at the Biennale. In the circumstances, there is something a little perverse about the way this Scottish enterprise has been framed. It has been presented to me several times that it is an opportunity for artists starting to make their mark to find an international audience. No doubt, but the show has cost ¬£250,000, not including the in-house budgets of the three organisations involved. Between six artists that is the equivalent to to a Creative Scotland Award for each of them, but it is public money that, in this international context, one might suppose should be spent on promoting Scotland’s reputation, not just that of the individual artists involved. They are a mean as well as an end.

Though there is no overt competition and there are no medals, the Biennale is the art world’s Olympics and the implications of that seem to have been lost in this showing. If Alex Salmond gets his way and sends a Scottish team to the real Olympics, will he send along a bunch of untried athletes so that they can benefit from the experience, or will he send those who have a real chance of winning?