Art reviews: RSA New Contemporaries/Reveal

The combined energy of some 60 artists (this year, 52 in Fine Art and eight architects) launching their careers is enough to leave one seeking a lie-down in a darkened room – and rightly so, as they're going to need all that fire to make it as artists in these difficult times.

When there is so much energy to contain, organisation plays an important role, and for the most part this show is thoughtfully and harmoniously curated, making optimal use of the building while allowing the bodies of work room to breathe.

Yet the very assault of so much youthful enthusiasm on the senses makes it difficult to be clear-eyed about a show like this. What does the pick of 2009 graduates from Scotland's art schools have to tell us? What is there here that will last?

It's still too early for reliable predictions. Much of this work comes straight from degree shows, or flows on directly from degree show work. Many of these artists will go on to further study, or will see the focus of their work change again in important ways. And other factors which have little to do with talent or application will help determine which of these artists we encounter again. However, if with this show we can take the temperature of emerging art in Scotland this year, we might conclude the following: conceptualism is no longer predominant as a modus operandi, but it is an important undercurrent. To a greater or lesser extent, almost all the artists here pay lip service to its diktats.

There is a marked return to narrative, from kitsch fairy tales to Greek myths to imagined dystopian futures to dream-like David-Lynch-style associations. The concept of "skill" has broadened considerably: today's artists might need to learn taxidermy, video editing or a spot of mechanics as much as painting or sculpture.

Jessica Ramm's Icarus Machines and Sisyphus Machines weren't moving when I visited, but the potential was clear. Full of aspiration and intricacy, like Leonardo Da Vinci sketches but with a very modern eye on the futility of existence, this is ambitious, mature work. Likewise, Jamie Fitzpatrick has found a fertile furrow in his Unnatural History Museum, a continuation of his degree show at Duncan of Jordanstone, in which he fuses sculpture and taxidermy, echoing both Victorian fantasy taxidermists and 21st century gene-manipulators.

Ernesto Canovas's 24-panel group of paintings, rendering a collection of mushroom-cloud photographs on to wood – for which he wins the 5,000 Stevenson Award – is also strong, mature work. He cleverly uses the grain of the wood to work with the image, while occasionally disrupting it with abstract flashes of bright colour. Jonathan Richards has developed a unique modus operandi building up layers of white paint to create sculptural works which look as though they were made of paper. Julia McKinlay combines clear abstract shapes and organic materials in her sculptures to great effect.

Harriet Lowther's The Big Thank You Project made headlines at the time of the degree shows in June. Her thank you letters to hundreds of organisations, from the makers of Ribena to her local train company, and the replies they provoked, struck a chord in an age where we increasingly feel distanced from the services we use. It shines again, here, but one wonders where she will go next, how she will move on. The same question could be asked of Omar Zingaro Bhatia, whose distinctive installation stands out here as it did at his Duncan of Jordanstone degree show. His grouping of pictures, objects, clothing and kitsch paraphernalia marks off his display area as an eccentric's lair, but will it be sufficiently adaptable to allow him to grow?

Identity remains a concern for many of these artists, and nowhere is it expressed more succinctly than in Jacqueline Shortland's sculpture, a mirrored letter 'I' on a human scale, installed in the entrance hallway of the RSA. Identity often exists in the pull of opposites, as communicated by the striking two-channel video installation by Moray School of Art's Selena S Kuzman. Artfully shot in black, white and red, the two films play on opposites – Apollo and Dionysus, male and female – and the viewer stands directly between them, physically unable to watch both at the same time.

Moray School of Art, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, is itself emerging. Though it is represented here by just two students, their work is as good as anything here. The other student, Janet Gordon, makes sad, thoughtful installations about memory and the loss of a parent to dementia.

Carolyn Scott, the only stand-out photographer in this show, is also concerned with memory, and with the quiet beauty of the everyday – the way light falls across cracked tiling, or the billowy white fabric of a row of choristers' gowns. She has an eye for detail and her work is a treat.

Laura Moss is also inspired by traces of the past: she pairs photographs of abandoned buildings with shrink-wrapped assemblages of everyday objects, like moments frozen in time. Fellow Glasgow graduate Maximillian Slaven obsessively catalogues photographs of building samples taken from art galleries as if they were scientific data or police evidence.

Eleanor Royle is a stand-out print-maker. She uses metal plates which once boarded up the windows of an abandoned asylum in creating her photo-etchings, managing to add a uniformity of texture while at the same time enhancing the sense of fragmentation and deterioration in the decaying rooms.

A group of painters from Glasgow School of Art play with notions of narrative: Michael Lacey makes black and white paintings which offer fragments of stories, like scenes from a film; August Krogan-Roley disrupts the familiar by splicing interiors with recognisable objects out of context; Louis Guy mixes up chronology in his energetic Bosch-style paintings of debauched celebration; and Rachel Wright weaves symbols, images and fragments of architecture into swirling dreamlike dramas with impressive control and skill.

Martin Hill, a Dundee graduate, also stands out with his bold, confident paintings of animals which manage to be at the same time both mythic and real. And film-maker/performer Rachel MacLean draws on popular culture and song for her kitsch musical videos (think a ghoulish Susan Boyle playing a blow-up guitar). Her catchy songs pervade the upper galleries.

Eleanor Royle's work also stands out in Reveal, Edinburgh Printmakers' biennial show of recent graduates to emerge in print-making. It isn't clear why artists such as Andy Cumming and Gregor Morrison, both print-making graduates from Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen who stand out at the RSA, don't also feature here.

One might be concerned about the future of print-making – Gray's is now the only Scottish art school which offers it as a dedicated degree – and it's true that fewer young artists explore it fully. But many do discover (or rediscover) it as their careers become established, and the 18 or so represented here are deft in their determination to exploit the potential of the different processes.

Thus Lucy Roscoe makes charming work in embossing and stencilling; Julie Wyness uses collograph and linocut to produce elegant nudes; Emma Noble pushes screenprints and relief prints towards abstract sculpture; Sarah Jane Whitehouse combines drawing and digital manipulation for her darkly imaginative take on Alice in Wonderland.

Here, as in the RSA, she is one of artists here who plays with narrative, along with Robert Powell, whose etchings owe something to the work of the satirists of the 18th century, and Rosie Walters, whose surreal fables are both quirky and disturbing.

&149 RSA New Contemporaries runs until 21 April; Reveal runs until 15 May.