Tales from the Loop, computer screen

A man in a bulky jacket stands in the snow carrying a computer screen and a plastic bag, pausing on his way home while two enormous machines hang in the sky above the rooftops. He barely seems to look up. That tension is the whole point of Simon Stålenhag's work: the impossible thing in the air is treated as unremarkable as the parked Volvo 240 beside the house, its tan paint and boxy lines instantly dating the scene to a Swedish winter somewhere in the 1980s or 90s.

Stålenhag is a Swedish artist who paints digitally, building landscapes that look like photographs from his own childhood in the suburbs outside Stockholm, then adding reactors, robots and drifting hulks as if they had always been there. This image belongs to Tales from the Loop, his 2014 book about a fictional underground particle accelerator buried beneath the Mälaren islands, a project that later grew into a tabletop role-playing game and a television series. The real skill on display here is the light: the teal glow spilling from the machine's underside, the pale orange strip of sunset at the horizon, and the way the snow holds every shade of blue between them.