Paula Rego
Until September 24; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Jannis Kounellis
Until 8 January; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Until 18 September; Edinburgh College of Art

In Celtic tradition, the year is divided into four quarters. Between these quarters there are cracks, the in-between times, including Hallowe’en and Beltane. If ritualised precautions are not taken, the spirits of the otherworld can sneak through these cracks into our own world, wreaking havoc on people and animals.

This is the territory inhabited by Paula Rego’s cast of characters; the point where the sea meets the land, where night meets day, and where children boggle on the brink of sexual awareness. Giant black crows seduce fey white cats, naked men lay golden eggs, and mothers become their daughters’ daughters. Everybody is in-between.

The Talbot Rice is crammed to the gunnels with 180 prints by the Portuguese-born artist – almost every print she ever made. The wall texts are stuck hastily to the walls without due love and attention, but that’s the only flaw in an otherwise dazzling exhibition.

Triple-hanging, generally outmoded and unhelpful, works here. The dense clutter of prints reinforces the claustrophobia contained within them. Moreover, Rego’s prints could stand comparison with the morality tales of Hogarth, or with the horrors of Goya, which would historically have been hung this way.

Rego’s largest series of prints is inspired by nursery rhymes, but they are far from sweet affairs, full of sugar and spice and everything nice. Rego sees instead the frogs and snails and puppy dog’s tails of which they are really made. The farmer’s wife cut off the tails of the three blind mice, remember, and the baby on the tree top falls, cradle and all. Rego etches these scenes with the unblinking directness of a child, topped with the knowingness of a worldly-wise adult.

Even the most benign rhymes develop an air of malevolence. In Baa Baa Black Sheep, the tall black ram wraps his arm and leg around an innocent little maid. Any evidence of malicious intent is purely circumstantial, but as with so many of Rego’s narratives, the air is thick with threat.

Women play the strongest roles in Rego’s stories. Even in Peter Pan, Wendy gets the star part. Jane Eyre is told in 24 images, the most powerful of which depicts the lunatic Bertha, deranged and shut away from public view. Her animal nature echoes the earlier figure of Dog Woman, a female driven to canine distraction.

Rego’s famous Abortion Series shows women plumbing the depths, and surviving. Made in response to a “no” vote in the 1998 Portuguese referendum on abortion, this is the only series of prints which Rego has adapted from pre-existing paintings. The artist prefers the spontaneity of making prints from scratch, allowing them to take their own direction, but the strong, resolved images here demonstrate such a sense of purpose that detailed preparation clearly has its merits.

The women are grim, but determined. They fill the frame, trapped in grubby rooms, ad-hoc operating theatres, bleeding into buckets and rags. Strong contours describe their sturdy bodies, weighed down by gravity and despair. Even their chunky feet – with something of Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters about them – are a portrait of determination.

Rego is a master of storytelling, and of acting. The simple figures of Sloth and Envy, while totally devoid of amateur dramatics, are positively teeming with character. Then there are the images of high drama that will stay with you forever: a woman, mouth gaping open, allows a pelican to reach its huge beak into her throat. Is it feeding her? Is its evil spirit entering her? Is it a sexual metaphor? It’s a Rego. It’s a mystery.

In the little pink document which has ruled my life of late, there is a crucial omission. The art festival guide points you toward the Jannis Kounellis installation at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), but entirely fails to mention its companion show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (SNGMA). This has been a summer of collaborations; Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cai Guo-Qiang were shared across a number of galleries; so too is Kounellis.

The Greek-born artist is a leading light of the Arte Povera movement, which revolutionised art in 1960s Italy with the use of every day, “poor” materials. Based in Rome since the age of 20, Kounellis has created his own artistic language, whose vocabulary includes coal, coffee, coats and girders. The grammar is derived from universal measurements: the dimensions of a double bed, the width of a door, the weight of a man.

At ECA, Kounellis has reconstructed a massive installation made last year for Modern Art Oxford. Dozens of huge crosses, made from rusty girders, march across a vast space floored with Turkish rugs. A solitary coat and hat hang from the last cross. The piece, which was at home in Oxford’s post-industrial gallery, is somewhat at odds with ECA’s neo-classical sculpture court.

When Kounellis started life as a painter, he wanted to avoid the abstraction which had taken a global hold, and the representational art which seemed to be its only alternative. At ECA lies the answer – his materials, presented rather than represented – evoke so many associations for us that their use is poetic rather than descriptive.

The riveted girders evoke our lost heavy industries, and an army on the march. The worn carpets suggest the simple, domestic life, but also the possibility of Islamic prayer. The crucifix-shaped girders introduce Christianity and the idea of martyrdom, connected with the coat and hat as the ordinary worker, the common man.

The exhibition at SNGMA is breath-taking. Seventeen bold works chart Kounellis’s career from 1958 right up to the present day. In a brand new installation Kounellis divides a huge sunlit room with a curtain of coloured glass, leaving three quarters of it empty, visible, but inaccessible. Right against the lumps of glass he has placed an older work, of coal and steel. It’s as if the base stuff of coal, our earthly staple, has been transfigured into something spiritual. The bright space beyond – where the unknowable lies – is far bigger than anything within reach.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.08.05