Ark Bird

A handful of tall birds wander down the middle of a wet road, unbothered, while two excavators sit idle in the dirt on either side. Everything is washed in the same grey green haze, so the only real colour in the picture is that strange band of orange, green and blue glowing on the horizon, shaped like an arch or a dome pushing up through the mist. It could be a sunrise bent through fog. It could be something far stranger. The painting never says, and the birds clearly do not care.

This is the work of Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish artist born in 1984 who paints digitally in a style so photographic that people often mistake his pictures for altered photos. He built his reputation on books like Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood and The Electric State, where flat northern farmland or dusty American roadside is interrupted by one impossible thing, usually half broken and already treated as ordinary by everyone nearby. The title points to the Ark Bird, a huge machine that drifts through his Electric State story and eventually comes down. Here it is left as a smear of light, more rumour than event.

What holds the image together is the unfinished roadwork: gravel shoulders, parked diggers, fresh asphalt with the lane markings only partly painted. Somebody was in the middle of a very dull job when whatever that is appeared. Stålenhag's trick is almost always this one, pairing the enormous with the mundane and trusting you to feel the gap between them.