Signalen

A delivery van has stopped in the middle of a forest road, hazard lights glowing orange on the wet asphalt, while two enormous theropods stride across in front of it. Nobody is running. The driver has simply pulled over, the way Swedish motorists do when an elk wanders onto the highway, and is presumably waiting for the animals to finish crossing. That ordinary patience is the whole joke and the whole point. Simon Stålenhag paints impossible things as though they were just part of the local wildlife, and the humor comes from how little fuss anyone makes about them.

Stålenhag is a Swedish artist who began as a nature and wildlife illustrator, painting birds and prehistoric animals before he started dropping robots, drones and dinosaurs into the damp pine forests and suburbs of his childhood. That background shows here: the dinosaurs have the weight and striped camouflage of real creatures rather than movie monsters, and the mist-flattened spruce trees behind them are painted with the same care as the van's dented bumper. The colors do a lot of the work, grey-violet fog against the single warm smear of brake light reflecting down the road.

He works digitally, and his scenes have become widely known through his books, including Tales from the Loop and The Electric State, both later adapted for the screen. This one is quieter than most of his famous images, closer to a roadside snapshot than a story. If you want a detail to hold onto, find the small blue parking sign on the left, half swallowed by branches, a stubborn piece of everyday bureaucracy in a landscape where the rules clearly need updating.