Fokaltornen

Three enormous curved towers rise out of an ordinary farmhouse, bending upward like tusks or ribs, their edges dotted with small amber lights. The building underneath looks completely normal: a tiled roof, a loading dock, outbuildings with green metal siding, the kind of working farm you would drive past without a second thought. Someone has bolted a piece of impossible machinery onto it, and the land around it carries on regardless, flat and sandy, with a line of trees holding their ground on the right. The sky does most of the work here, a deep blue twilight that drains the colour out of everything below it.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish painter and writer whose work almost always follows this formula: the countryside he grew up in, plus some enormous piece of technology that nobody in the picture seems particularly bothered by. His books, including Tales from the Loop and The Electric State, built a following large enough to become television and film adaptations. The title here means "the focal towers," and like most of his machines it is never fully explained, which is part of the appeal. He works digitally, with a photographic eye for Nordic light, and the real trick is how carefully he paints the boring parts. The ventilation pipes, the fence posts, the pale winter grass. Make the farm convincing enough and the impossible thing growing out of it starts to feel almost reasonable.