Crystals and Casiowary

Two travelers crest a dune at dusk: a person in a yellow jacket with a pack and what looks like a rifle slung across their back, and a tall flightless bird walking a few steps behind like a dog. Ahead of them, enormous grey cubes erupt from the sand in leaning stacks, their edges catching a pale blue light that does not seem to come from the sky. They could be crystals, as the title suggests, or they could be something manufactured and discarded, since several of them have the unmistakable proportions of old television sets. The artist leaves that question open, which is usually how his pictures work.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish painter and illustrator who built his reputation on scenes exactly like this one: ordinary people and animals moving through landscapes littered with strange machinery, painted with the dull weather and scrubby vegetation of the Scandinavian countryside. His books "Tales from the Loop", "Things from the Flood" and "The Electric State" have been adapted for television and film, and "The Electric State" in particular is full of long walks through deserts piled with dead technology. He paints digitally, but with a loose, brushy touch that keeps everything slightly unresolved. The trick he uses here is simple and effective: make the people small, the clutter huge, and tell us nothing about how either got there.