The Labyrinth, Black Sun

Two figures stand at the edge of a flowering meadow, a child in a bright yellow coat and an adult in red, their backs to us, facing something enormous. Curling tendrils rise out of the mist like the ribs of some dead sea creature, and above them hangs a black disc ringed in white fire. The yellow coat is the only warm note in a painting otherwise built from pale green haze, and it works hard: that small splash of colour tells you these are people, small and breakable, standing in front of something that does not care about them at all.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish artist who made his name painting ordinary Nordic landscapes with impossible machines parked in them, in books like Tales from the Loop and The Electric State. This image comes from The Labyrinth, published in 2020, which is his bleakest story so far: the Earth's surface has been swallowed by a poisonous gloom, survivors live in underground shelters, and the strange shapes on the horizon are all that's left of a world gone wrong. He paints digitally, with a cinematic eye borrowed as much from film as from fine art, and his trick is always the same simple one, placing recognisable human life beside the completely unexplainable and letting you fill in the rest. The flowers at the bottom of the frame are worth noticing. Whatever happened here, the meadow is still blooming.