Mutant Year Zero, Elysium

A policeman falls away from us down a vast shaft at the heart of a futuristic city, arms flung wide, his back toward the viewer as he drops. We are looking straight down with him. The walls rush away in stacked windows, cables, catwalks and pink neon, shrinking toward the glowing floor far below, where a scatter of pale circles throws up a burst of light behind his silhouette. The vertigo comes from one simple trick: every line in the scene converges on that same bright point, so your eye plummets whether you want it to or not. Look at the sweeping arcs curving around the shaft walls, those long whiplash lines that owe as much to Art Nouveau ironwork as to any science fiction city. That mix of neon grime and elegant curves is what gives the picture its particular flavour, somewhere between cyberpunk and a Paris metro entrance.

This is the work of Simon Stålenhag, the Swedish painter best known for pictures of children on bicycles beside rusting robots in flat suburban fields, the world of his books Tales from the Loop and The Electric State. Here he is working in a very different register, painting for Mutant: Elysium, part of the Swedish post apocalyptic roleplaying game Mutant: Year Zero. Elysium is a sealed underground arcology where the rich sat out the end of the world in comfort while everything above them rotted. The glittering balconies and signs are what is left of that luxury, and this officer, one of the enforcers who kept order inside it, is on a one way trip through the whole structure. Stålenhag paints digitally, and atmosphere is his real strength: the teal gloom, the cold electric haze, the sense that all those lights are still burning for nobody in particular.