The Procession

A giant machine stands in the middle of a rain-slicked highway, hunched forward on long legs, its body a tangle of cables and plating. Those cables run all the way down to the asphalt, where they connect to a scattering of small human figures, and the people are walking away from the machine, toward a station wagon parked on the shoulder and toward us. They do not look like they are choosing their direction. Everything else is fog and blue haze, with faint hills and a few trees barely surfacing through it. The painted road markings in the foreground are rendered with the same care as the creature, which is part of the trick: the ordinary details are so convincing that the impossible thing feels like it belongs there too.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish artist who began his career illustrating birds and landscapes, and that training shows in how he handles weather, wet pavement, and light. He became widely known through illustrated books such as Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State, which blend Nordic or American countryside with abandoned technology and towering machines. His scenes rarely explain themselves, and he usually leaves the backstory to a short caption or to the viewer. The title does a lot of work here: a procession suggests ceremony and willing feet, but the cables say otherwise, and the small car waiting at the roadside is the only thing in the painting that still looks like it has a choice.