Street Light

A person stands at the roadside with a cable running from their head into a steel cabinet, as casually as someone topping up a car with petrol. The bulky device strapped over their face has a short antenna and no eyes, and the yellow jacket catches the lamp glow above them. Whatever is happening, it seems routine. Nobody has stopped to watch, because there is nobody else around.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish painter who built a following by dropping robots, drones and odd machinery into ordinary Scandinavian landscapes: fields, power lines, suburban car parks. His books Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood and The Electric State all run on that same trick, and the last of those features people wearing headsets called neurocasters, who gradually lose themselves in a networked dream. The figure here looks like a cousin of those characters. The painting is digital, and he uses the medium for effects that would be fiddly in oil, especially the two clashing light sources: the cold green fluorescent tubes marching away into fog on the left, and the warm sodium cone on the right that isolates the figure like a stage spotlight. The empty road between them does a lot of the work.