Things from the Flood

Six people in puffy winter coats stand at the edge of a snowy road, hands in pockets, watching something enormous rise out of the fog. It looks like a bulb of dark metal sprouting cables or tentacles that plant themselves in the frozen field, with two more shapes looming faintly behind it. What sells the picture is how unbothered everyone seems. The onlookers have the posture of neighbors who came out to see what the commotion was about. Nobody is running.

This is the work of Simon Stålenhag, a Swedish artist born in 1984 who paints digitally and has built a career on one simple trick done very well: take the flat farmland, pine edges and winter light of the Stockholm countryside he grew up around, then drop in something impossible and refuse to explain it. The image comes from his book Things from the Flood, set in the 1990s after an underground particle physics facility known as the Loop floods and strange machinery starts surfacing across the islands west of Stockholm. His earlier book, Tales from the Loop, became an Amazon television series and a tabletop role playing game.

The snow does a lot of the work here. It flattens everything into pale grey, swallows the horizon, and leaves footprints and tire tracks in the foreground that lead your eye straight toward the figures and the thing they are staring at. Stålenhag has said he is less interested in monsters than in the feeling of childhood landscapes that have gone slightly wrong, and this painting mostly delivers an atmosphere rather than a story. Whatever that structure is, the people in the coats will probably go home for dinner afterward.