VENICE — The Palazzo Michiel dal Brusa, a grand 14th-century pile here near the Rialto Bridge, is not exactly a place of desolation. It is filled with frescoes and lapped by the waters of the Grand Canal, and in the afternoon its cavernous first floor is suffused with a tender Renaissance light.

But when the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson invited a reporter to visit him there the other day, he wrote, “See you at the abyss.” And what anyone who stops by his work space at the palazzo will find, now or over the next six months, is a farcically romantic idea of what the end of the world might look like, at least for an artist: Mr. Kjartansson, standing at an easel day after day, relentlessly painting the portrait of a man who poses before him in a black Speedo, cigarette and beer in hand.

As time passes, the canvases Mr. Kjartansson makes — he plans to complete one a day — will mount up around him, as will the empty bottles and butt-filled ashtrays, all of it a monument to artistic ruin. On Tuesday, the second day of a marathon that will drag on until Christmas, the elegiac effect was heightened by Mozart’s Requiem blaring from an old record player.

“Stand, please,” Mr. Kjartansson said to the model, a friend and fellow Icelandic artist named Pall Haukur Bjornsson.

“O.K.,” Mr. Bjornsson said listlessly, rising from a couch, dropping his blue terrycloth robe and leaning against a stone cistern as Mr. Kjartansson, with a painterly beard and slicked-back hair, mixed oil paint on a palette.

Since its creation in 1895, the Venice Biennale has always functioned as a kind of art Olympiad, with nations proudly showcasing their best artists in ostentatious pavilions.

So after Mr. Kjartansson (his name is pronounced RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun) was chosen to represent Iceland last year, he said, he first had to figure out what it would mean, exactly, to be the artistic exemplar of a now near-bankrupt country, one of the hardest hit by the financial crisis. And also what the Biennale itself would represent this year, in its first incarnation since all the air escaped from the great art bubble of the past decade.

His idea, at an event where art installations can sometimes be large enough to arrive on cargo ships, was to make a project rigorously stripped of the extraneous and the expensive: just himself, some cheap art materials and a subject. The only luxury would be time, which in this case might be viewed instead as penance.

“I just had this image of this guy, smoking, drinking, by the water, looking out at the Prosecco Venetian light,” Mr. Kjartansson said. “I thought of him as this man without fate — which is all what we’re living back home, in a way.”

Titled “The End,” the performance grows out of much recent work by Mr. Kjartansson, 33, a darkly funny provocateur whose profile has been rising in the art world. (He is represented by the prominent Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine; Daniel Birnbaum, the curator of this year’s Biennale, chose him to participate in another large international exhibition he oversaw last year in Turin.)

His work often involves the idea of endurance, nodding to pioneering performance artists like Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic. But it is overlaid with a kind of self-conscious goofiness that plays on both Nordic notions of the tragic and on the predicament of the contemporary artist feeling his way around an increasingly fragmented, disorienting art world.

In a 2002 work called “Death and the Children” he dressed up in a dark suit and carried a scythe, leading young children — who had no idea what the costume meant — through a cemetery, trying earnestly to answer their questions about fate. In 2007 in a piece called “God,” he wore a tuxedo and played the role of an old-fashioned crooner on a pink-draped stage with an orchestra, singing, “Sorrow conquers happiness” over and over as the music swelled.

Last year in a performance that could be seen as a warm-up for Venice, he assumed all the clichéd trappings of a plein-air painter, sitting on a hillside in upstate New York with an easel, smoking cigars and reading “Lolita” while he worked.

Mr. Kjartansson, who trained as a painter at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, said his intention in neither that work nor in Venice was to disparage painting. In the manner of many young artists now, he seems to be trying to express a kind of simultaneous reverence and mockery, though maybe only the mockery of ribbing himself for longing to be a more traditional artist.

“I think, secretly, it’s what every artist wants to do, just to sit and paint and smoke and think,” he said.