Visual arts review: Martin Boyce

THIS is the 53rd Biennale. Do the maths. It has been around a long time, but this is only the fourth Biennale to which Scotland has made an official contribution. This time it is with No Reflections, a one-man show by Martin Boyce. It is not in the main Giardini, however, the park dedicated to the Biennale with permanent national pavilions.

Reflecting Britain's place in world politics a century ago, the British Pavilion is a neo-classical temple occupying a dominant site at the highest point in the gardens. It is called the British Pavilion, but like the British Olympic football team for 2012 , it is British in name, but English in fact – although in this case the English monopoly is not by agreement with the other British nations, as it is with the football team.

The British Pavilion is strictly English and that position is jealously guarded by the British Council. This year Steve McQueen has the celebrity spot, and I will return to review his show on Tuesday. No, the other British players, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish have to go out into what you might call the fringe. With unconscious black humour they are called Collateral Exhibitions. Just like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, during the Biennale there is a huge Diaspora of competing exhibitions scattered across every conceivable site in the city and beyond. These national teams have to pay commercial rent for the places they hire, and the Biennale runs for six months so that is a very considerable cost. Meanwhile, however, presumably we all also share the cost of the upkeep of the grand British Pavilion. That is something Alex Salmond might get his teeth into.

This year the Scottish show – it can't be called a pavilion in the way that other national representations are – is up 61 steep steps in the Palazzo Pisani. It is a tiny palazzo as far from the Vaporetto, Venice's public transport, as it is possible to get. The front door is hidden in an alleyway and there are a quite a few who will not be able to climb those steps, but Martin Boyce says he chose this venue after considering a lot of options. He did not know Venice and says: "No number of tales from friends or previously participating artists could have prepared me for the city. It is extraordinary on every level." He hadn't actually realised there was no traffic till he went on a trip to the Lido, where there are cars, and he nearly got run over. In the end, his choice of the Palazzo Pisani, where there is a suite of rooms with low ceilings, seems to have been part of the business of coming to terms with Venice. "There was something in the atmosphere and the journey through the different rooms that stayed with me," says Boyce. "It had a sense of abandonment."

Much in Venice is abandoned, or looks it. Travel the Grand Canal at night and you will see precious few lighted windows. Seeing the Biennale Gardens out of season, when they do look very abandoned, focused that sense for Boyce, too. "For some reason I kept imagining the Palazzo as an abandoned garden," he says. (The abandoned Biennale Gardens are also the subject of the film that is Steve McQueen's contribution to the Biennale.)

There are a number of minor works in Boyce's show. There are deconstructed letters on the wall and odd bits of furniture on the floors, and he has replaced the Venetian chandeliers with constructivist sculpture in black aluminium, but there is only one major work. Oddly it is presented as two, A River in the Trees and Evaporated Pools, but they are inextricably intermingled. In them Boyce picks up his idea of the abandoned garden, but he also makes reference to the omnipresent water of Venice. "How do I introduce a pool into the second floor of a Venetian Palazzo?" he asked himself. A dried-up pool was the answer. The central room is long and narrow. Huge polygonal stepping stones march its length (A River in the Trees), while the marble composition floor is scattered with brown paper leaves (Evaporated Pools). "The stepping stones left in the dried-up pool; the autumn leaves replacing the shimmering water," Boyce comments. It was the dried-up pool that gave the show its title, No Reflections, a curiously perverse idea in Venice, the city of reflected light. More apparent perversity – these stepping stones are made of concrete, but concrete fondu, I was assured. It is apparently lighter than solid concrete, but the biggest blocks still weigh up to 200 kilos. When a large party of people came in while I was there, I had scary visions of Eva Green in a collapsing Venetian Palazzo at the end of Casino Royale. All credit to the Venetian engineers of 500 years ago; the floor didn't even creak.

These blocks reminded me initially of the basalt rocks in 7000 Oaks by Boyce's near namesake, Joseph Beuys. There is also another more personal reference, the artist reveals, though it was apparently at first an unconscious one. He had already embarked on the stepping stones when he remembered something from his childhood. "I was brought up in a new housing estate surrounded by what we children called 'the woods'. Across one part of the stream that ran through these woods, someone had dumped five or six bags of cement. The cement had hardened, creating a set of stepping stones. They were known as the golden steps."

This is the River in the Trees of the title. This work is also a homage to the great Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, however, whom Boyce discovered while he was in Venice. "Scarpa's work introduced an amazing convergence of the ancient and modern in a way that I had previously never experienced," he says. The polygonal concrete blocks are typical of Scarpa and in fact he actually designed a garden for the Biennale itself that was indeed abandoned for a long time. It was restored two years ago and has both a pool and polygonal concrete slabs. To complete a circle that Boyce followed without at first realising it, DCA has curated this show and Richard Murphy, the architect of Dundee Contemporary Arts's highly successful building, is a devoted follower of Scarpa. Nice symmetry.

This is the first time that a single Scottish artist has been chosen for the Biennale (though yet again he is from the group of Glasgow MFA graduates who have monopolised the Scottish presence at the Biennale so far). The three previous and very undistinguished Scottish contributions have been group shows. Boyce also has some reputation already. He is not, as in the previous shows, an artist at the beginning of his career. So does No Reflections do the business? Have we finally got a Scottish presence at the Biennale we can be proud of?

Not quite, I fear. Boyce's work is odd and charming, but "Hamilton boy discovers Venice" is not going to make many headlines. This work is simply too cosy to make a mark in the fiercely competitive climate of the Biennale. The whole enterprise looks unsophisticated, too. It doesn't seem altogether sensible to let the artist choose a venue so far off the beaten track that it excludes a significant part of the public. We need to find an artist strong enough to claim the British Pavilion. On our showing so far, we have had no chance of doing that. I know we have the artists. We just need to look a little more widely to find them.

• Read more from Duncan Macmillan on the Venice Biennale in The Scotsman on Tuesday.