Fantastic plastic from the magician of the pound shop

Nathan Coley

Doggerfisher

EDINBURGH

Rachel Whiteread

Ingleby Gallery

EDINBURGH

David Batchelor

Talbot Rice Gallery

EDINBURGH

Landing at Edinburgh airport, you fly over a hayfield into which some happy soul has ploughed the word "Hi". This comes back to you as you stand in the Doggerfisher gallery, looking at a new work by Nathan Coley called Safe House. Dolly-sized and built of white hardboard, Coley's semi has gnomic legends carved into it: "Life" on the front door, "Mind" on a dormer, "Wealth" on a gable-end, "Belief" on the roof. You wonder what it can all mean, and whether the artist has been out on his tractor. This kind of connection is exactly what the Edinburgh Art Festival is about.

Now firmly established as part of the festival at large, this year's visual arts component includes some big set pieces: a brace of Picasso shows at the Dean Gallery and National Museum; Warhol at the National Gallery; a Richard Long exhibition, if you like that sort of thing, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. To my mind, though, it is the equivalent of the fringe that holds the festival's real treasures, small, allusive and hidden away. The Doggerfisher show is a case in point. From the moment you stumble over Coley's conceptual welcome-mat - an oak lintel adorned with the warning "Mind the threshold sculpture" - you're faced with doubt on an intimate scale. Seeing Coley's work as part of this year's Turner Prize show is one thing; seeing it here, up-close and personal, is quite another.

Pieces such as Untitled (Barricade Sculpture) hem you in and rub your face in it. You look for guidance to a lightbox sign called Here and There, but there is no There there, only Here. There turns out to be in the gallery's office, which means butting in on three chatting women to see it. (Embarrassment is one of Coley's best materials.) Black-and-white photographs on the walls are of baroque confessionals, though the centre of these has been whited-out. There is no escape from Coley's vision, no forgiveness. But, as with the field at Edinburgh airport, there is joyous coincidence to be had even so.

Up the hill at the Ingleby Gallery, two dozen artists have been invited to show their own work in dialogue with other artworks in a rolling series of eight-day shows. By the time you read this, alas, Rachel Whiteread's response to her chosen object - Rabbie Burns's breakfast table - will have finished its run. A plaster cast of a cardboard box, Cushion, filled the room so that the only thing that seemed solid was the Bard of Ayrshire's furniture, the rickety relic of a ghost.

If you missed Whiteread's show, you can at least console yourself with David Batchelor's from 11 to 18 August. The Dundee-born master's Found Monochromes of London - slide projections of signs which have faded or been effaced, made between 1997 and 2003 - will be shown alongside Nikolai Suetin's White Square (1924-26), a pairing that makes you rethink Batchelor as a formalist rather than a colourist. It also makes you wonder if he hasn't been talking to the Glaswegian Coley, whose Annihilated Confessions down the Hill at Doggerfisher are also about the power of effacement.

If that leap doesn't appeal to you, then you can start instead with Coley's SecularIconinanAge of Moral Uncertainty - jujube- coloured fairground lights on an aluminium panel - and wend your way up to the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh University's Old College buildings. Here, Batchelor has installed a group of new works, called Parapillars, in a show with the name of Unplugged. Batchelor is, of course, the magician of the pound shop, a genius who finds peculiar beauty in the plastic and cheap. His Parapillars take this talent to its extreme. Clustered together in a glade of fake pine trees, these new sculptures combine the aesthetic of Jeff Koons with that of Caspar David Friedrich. Some of Batchelor's pines are seven- and-a half-feet tall and multicoloured; others, apparently blighted with leaf scorch, barely hit three feet and are black.

All but two are covered with the results of his wanderings in the land of the naff. One black number is made up entirely of magnifying glasses, tea strainers and doorstops, although this counts as atypically minimalist in Batchelor terms. By contrast, a pink tree is built from toy aeroplanes, plastic clothes pegs, cheap hairbrushes, toothbrushes, lavatory brushes, paper grips and ice- lolly holders, among much else.

There is something deeply humane about this work, something witty and patient. Consumeri st man has made an entire universe of pinks only to waste them on rubbish. Batchelor, the Howard Carter of trash, has come along and rescued this universe, exhumed its beauty. If you see one thing this festival - if you see one thing this year - make it his show.

Nathan Coley: Doggerfisher (0131 558 7110) to 15 Sept; Ingleby Gallery (0131 556 4441); David Batchelor: Talbot Rice Gallery (0131 650 2210) to 29 Sept