The Labyrinth, Ruins

A single thin hose snakes across the rubble toward us, and following it back leads to the only living thing in sight: a figure in a white protective suit, standing in the middle of a dead street with buildings crumbling away on both sides. That hose is a lifeline, pumping breathable air from somewhere safe, and it tells you everything about this world without a word of explanation. Above the haze at the end of the street hangs something enormous and organic, all tendrils and plating and one great lidless eye, close enough to be terrifying and far enough that the walker seems not to have noticed it yet.

The image comes from Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish painter and writer born in 1984 who built a career on dropping impossible machines into ordinary landscapes. His earlier books, Tales from the Loop and The Electric State, placed robots and reactors in the flat farmland outside Stockholm. The Labyrinth, published in 2020, goes darker: humanity has retreated underground after a catastrophe, and survivors venture up into a poisoned surface world in sealed suits. Stålenhag paints digitally, working in a cinematic style that owes a lot to film concept art, and he favours murky greens and greys that make distance feel like a physical substance. The monster is almost incidental to the real subject, which is the scale of the empty city and one small person walking into it anyway.