The remains of the future by Simon Stålenhag

It is difficult to tackle the work of an artist like Simon Stålenhag. I have always been fascinated by his work, since the release of his first book Tales from the Loop, and then the following three books. I have never been to Sweden, I even grew up in the south of France, which is the complete opposite in terms of climate. And yet, this artist’s illustrations have always spoken to me. They resonate with something in me, a kind of nostalgia for a time that I never experienced but which I nevertheless know by heart.

Simon’s entire oeuvre lies on the borderline between grand natural landscapes and science fiction, two subjects that are often at odds with each other. When observing them, one feels a kind of nostalgia, sometimes even melancholy. Because here, we are far from a world at war or a Blade Runner-style cyberpunk city. No, here time seems to have almost stood still at a moment that never existed.

But I know that moment, because it is the sum of the elements of my childhood. Many things speak to me when I look at the works of this artist, that silence that runs through the plains where old, disused robots stand enthroned, that feeling of tranquility when one observes some of these inert machines, that stupor in the face of the use of technology.

These are illustrations that seem to have always belonged to our culture, to Science Fiction, giving the impression of having always been there. But that is not all of Simon Stålenhag’s talent, because the stories he writes are even more exciting, even more memorable.

Simon Stålenhag’s paintings are a strange and compelling mix of ordinary scenes from the Swedish countryside and haunting scenarios involving abandoned robots, mysterious machines and even dinosaurs. They are the fruit of his childhood memories – he grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and painted landscapes and wild animals – and his taste for science fiction as an adult. All his art is currently spread over four narrative artbooks, each one crazier than the last.

Simon Stålenhag: portrait of an artist

Simon Stålenhag was born in the early 1980s in the peaceful suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden. From his childhood, the Nordic landscape of his early years had a lasting influence on him, imbuing his imagination with images that were both familiar and slightly strange. He grew up amidst these wide, cold and open horizons, between wooded expanses and industrial areas, an atmosphere conducive to daydreaming and solitary games that would later nourish his artistic universe.

This childhood was also shaped by an early fascination with cinema and tabletop role-playing games, whose universe rich in stories and illustrations fueled his imagination as a child and then as a teenager. Among these influences are the classic science fiction of the 80s and 90s, such as Spielberg or the disturbing and visionary visions of Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as the poetic strangeness of David Cronenberg’s films. These varied sources gradually form the layers of a singular style where the strange is subtly inserted into the banality of everyday life.

He quickly developed a unique artistic technique, fusing an almost hyperrealistic photographic precision with an ability to subtly introduce disruptive, almost dreamlike elements into seemingly innocuous scenes. Stålenhag often uses photography as a basis, a foundation that he profoundly modifies, on which he applies layers and textures until he creates tableaux that perpetually oscillate between the real and the imaginary. This method allows him to accurately capture the particular atmosphere he is looking for: a strange balance between nostalgic comfort and diffuse uneasiness, which will become his trademark.

His first book, Tales from the Loop, published in 2014, appears as an immediate revelation, laying the foundations for a rich universe that is both intimate and mysterious. This first work quickly found its audience, charmed by his way of telling stories without ever fully revealing them. Building on this success, Simon continued his approach with three other major books: Things from the Flood, The Electric State and The Labyrinth. Each of these works reinforced his reputation as a profoundly original artist, capable of conveying complex emotions through visuals that haunt the minds of those who contemplate them for a long time.

Stålenhag’s artistic journey is also marked by constant evolution. While he remains true to his favorite themes—nostalgia, lost childhood, the impact of technology on humans—each new book pushes him a little further into the exploration of darker, more complex, and sometimes openly nightmarish territories. Moving from the bittersweet memories of a retro-futuristic childhood in Tales from the Loop, to the adult nightmares of The Electric State and the existential torments of The Labyrinth, he demonstrates a rare ability to adapt and refine his style to convey increasingly nuanced emotions. By following his artistic trajectory, we can better understand why his visual narratives resonate so much with our era, subtly reflecting our own anxieties and hopes buried in familiar, but never completely reassuring, landscapes.

Artistic universe: between nostalgia and melancholy

A universal nostalgia

Simon Stålenhag does not simply paint pictures. He sketches the contours of a collective memory that we have lost track of, of a strange past that does not belong to us but which, nevertheless, is deeply rooted in our feelings. As we browse through his illustrations, we are gripped by an inexplicable sensation: the impression of contemplating the scattered fragments of a bygone era that seems to have always existed somewhere deep within us, without ever having been real.

His retro-futuristic landscapes resonate with this universal nostalgia, a diffuse emotion that permeates each of his scenes, where the 80s and 90s are subtly mixed with imaginary technology. This universe where children run among forgotten robots, vehicles levitate gently above the tall grass, and dinosaurs roam peacefully near rusty cars, evokes memories of a shared childhood that we would have experienced collectively. We then remember things that we never really experienced, but whose familiar details are nevertheless perfectly recognizable.

The nostalgia that emerges from his works is not only linked to the years that were lost, but also to the idea of a promised future that was never achieved, a dreamed-of modernity that was ultimately disappointing. It is Scandinavian retro-futurism, nourished by the visual codes of the 80s, where floating vehicles display sleek lines worthy of films like Back to the Future or Encounters of the Third Kind. But in Stålenhag’s work, this technological future never shines completely; it falters, rusts, slowly fades under the effect of time and abandonment. The impression that something remains unfulfilled or irretrievably lost thus runs through every illustration.

This particular emotional atmosphere, this bittersweet melancholy, has a profound effect on Stålenhag’s universe. His world is imbued with a nostalgic gentleness mixed with latent sadness. It is a quiet, almost comfortable melancholy that finds its echo in the great Swedish outdoors, these countryside bathed in the pale, diffused light of an eternally low winter sun. Each scene seems to capture that moment when you realize that something is irretrievably over, without being able to clearly identify its nature. And this subtle emotion creeps under our skin, lingering long after our gaze has left the canvas, leaving an impression of strange nostalgia.

The aesthetics of contrast

Much of the fascination of Simon Stålenhag’s work lies in his mastery of the art of contrast. He constantly confronts two seemingly opposite realities: on the one hand, meticulous, almost photographic, everyday realism, and on the other, surreal or disturbing science fiction elements. This juxtaposition creates a constant aesthetic tension that draws the gaze and invites you to explore every detail and every nook and cranny of the image.

The technology he depicts never emerges triumphant, nor even particularly futuristic. Rather, it seems forgotten there, as if abandoned, rusting silently in deserted fields. Robots at a standstill, covered by patient vegetation, floating vehicles motionless in the sky, monumental, half-destroyed installations that bear witness to a bygone grandeur whose precise meaning eludes us. This obsolete technology, once the promise of a bright future, has become a simple element of the decor, one ruin among others.

This powerful contrast is also evident in his remarkable use of light. Stålenhag’s landscapes are often bathed in a pastel luminosity, where the light of day gently stretches into eternal twilights. Cold blues, pale pinks and faded oranges illuminate these strange and silent landscapes. This light, so soft and soothing in appearance, paradoxically amplifies the strangeness of the scenes depicted, giving each painting a dreamlike atmosphere that oscillates between a peaceful dream and a discreet nightmare.

Thus, the artistic universe of Simon Stålenhag is permeated by a permanent tension between real and imaginary, past and future, nostalgia and anguish. It is this subtle play of contrasts that gives his works their very special evocative power, their ability to haunt the minds of those who contemplate them for a long time. His landscapes become unsettling mirrors in which we see reflected our own contradictions and our complex relationship with time and memory.

Tales from the Loop: nostalgia and childhood

The world of Tales from the Loop opens up to us like an old photograph found by chance, blurred in places but strangely familiar, full of emotions that slowly rise to the surface. It is a parallel Sweden, frozen in an eternal late 80s, whose entire existence revolves around a huge particle accelerator buried under the fields. This “Loop” subtly shapes every aspect of everyday life: it disturbs reality, generates imperceptible anomalies, and brings unexpected technological vestiges to the surface of the rural landscapes.

The world of Tales from the Loop is imbued with a childlike nostalgia that can be felt in every scene. The atmosphere that emanates from it is that of innocence confronted with a world that it does not yet fully understand, in which technology, far from being only a source of wonder, also carries the seeds of an underlying anxiety. Through the eyes of children exploring these altered territories, the viewer feels this naive fascination, this gaze of wonder at huge, silent machines, but also a lack of understanding in the face of a universe that they cannot yet fully grasp. This gives rise to a form of deep empathy: an ambiguous nostalgia, that of a childhood that is not exactly our own, but which nevertheless echoes a common, universal experience.

This powerful nostalgia, which gives the work all its emotional force, draws its inspiration from science fiction film classics. Here we see the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult film Stalker, with its subtly altered natural spaces and mysterious industrial landscapes, charged with an invisible threat. As in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stålenhag stages enigmatic encounters with alien forces, whose intentions are completely beyond the protagonists’ control, leaving them both amazed and fascinated. Finally, the hypnotic atmosphere of the film Beyond the Black Rainbow, which combines latent anxiety with nostalgia for the aesthetics of the 80s, resonates deeply in the world of the Loop.

Unlike later works such as The Electric State, it is less a single, continuous narrative than a series of vignettes reflecting on a general theme, exploring youthful memories of that intermediate period between childhood and adolescence, when the world is changing. It reads like a wonderful collection of artworks created individually before being bound together by a loose afterthought narrative, but it is no less impactful (as proven by the fact that it has been adapted into a TV series).

He proudly sticks to his concept, as if Stålenhag were delving back into his own childhood to tell these stories and paint these incredible images of technology, everyday life and the occasional fantasy, all mixed together. While it is not (understandably) as sophisticated as The Electric State, it is nonetheless a fascinating and melancholy alternative story and a fascinating glimpse into the mind and imagination of a phenomenal storyteller.

To construct this very special world, Simon Stålenhag uses several visual techniques that give his images their unique, immediately identifiable character. His remarkable mastery of light is undoubtedly one of the most striking features of his work. He favors twilight hours, those moments of transition between day and night, when the colors of the sky—pale blues, diluted pinks, subtle oranges—create an atmosphere that is both gentle and uncertain. Each painting seems to capture a suspended moment, an hour when time seems to stand still, when natural light accentuates the strangeness of what is happening before our eyes.

This mastery of light is accompanied by a subtle use of blurring and artistic blurring. Certain parts of the scenes are deliberately imprecise, almost veiled, as if to suggest the presence of a mystery, an enigma just out of reach. Blur here becomes a powerful narrative tool, a way of inviting the gaze to search more deeply, to lose itself in evocative details, to imagine the story hidden behind each indistinct silhouette.

Finally, colorimetry plays a crucial role in the complex emotional balance of the work. Stålenhag favors slightly desaturated pastel tones, as if faded by time, which accentuate the impression of distant memories or a half-forgotten dream. Cold, soft colors dominate, contrasting with bright spots of color, often associated with technological elements (abandoned machines, floating vehicles, robots). This subtle but constant contrast reinforces the visual and narrative tension, making each illustration a puzzle to be decoded, a fragment of a story to be pieced together by the viewer.

Simon Stålenhag has created a visual narrative in which the emotional power comes precisely from what the artist does not show in full. He trusts the viewer to fill in the blanks, connecting the visual and emotional clues scattered throughout his works himself. And it is precisely this constant invitation to the imagination, this trust placed in the audience to piece together their own stories, that makes this first chapter so memorable, powerful and universal.

Things from the Flood: the end of innocence

This second narrative artbook opens with dread. An insidious, raw fear that only intensifies as the pages turn. And even though we know that everything will end well, these pages become heavier and heavier as we progress, until, finally, each panel of magnificent and deeply moving art or each brief punch of the accompanying text is so charged with loss and disorienting strangeness that the pages become difficult to lift. You dread what comes next, in the best possible way. And you can’t help but look.

The true power of Simon Stålenhag’s works lies in their ability to create entire worlds from almost nothing: a few words, a handful of short sentences, and an image as captivating as it is disturbing. A single one of his illustrations is enough to tell ten thousand stories, evoke infinite worlds, and unfold a succession of imaginary films behind our closed eyelids. Each painting contains a whole life, a memory so precise and yet never experienced, that each blink of the eyes becomes the door open to a new possible scenario. But it is in Things from the Flood that his genius reaches another level: in the midst of a universe populated by mutated robots and biomechanical oddities, the most poignant memory remains the simple and heartbreaking one of the narrator’s best friend, forced by his mother to move to another city. As if, deep down, human emotions were always more disturbing and haunting than the nightmarish visions that haunt the landscape.

If Tales from the Loop represented the almost naive innocence of childhood, Things from the Flood is the brutal awakening of adolescence, when illusions disappear to make way for a much less sweet, much less simple reality. In this second part, disaster strikes suddenly: an uncontrollable flood submerges the countryside surrounding the Loop, now officially deactivated. What seemed to be a marvel of technology quickly reveals itself to be a silent and insidious threat, releasing a toxic substance that invades the soil, homes and streets, irreparably disrupting everyday life. The Swedish rural landscape, once peaceful and gently disturbed, is drowning in dark water, contaminated by mysterious liquids that have escaped from the Loop. This deluge represents the turning point where the childlike and protective universe tips over into a cold and disenchanted universe, marked by the irreversible loss of innocence.

The children of Tales from the Loop are now teenagers, forced to grow up in a world that has become more hostile. They no longer look at technology with the innocent, wonder-filled gaze of childhood. Now, the once-fascinating mechanical ruins are all that remain of a disappointing past. For them, melancholy has become oppressive, full of regret and disillusionment. Adolescence in this transformed world is the painful realization that the promises of childhood may have been nothing but mirages, and that the adult world that awaits them offers no certainties, only a horizon blurred by uncertainty.

The teenage protagonists of Things from the Flood are haunted by catastrophe The teenage protagonists of Things from the Flood are haunted by catastrophe, haunted by the actions of previous generations, prisoners of a world where technology no longer means progress, but loss. Where Tales from the Loop was like a child’s dream, an enchanted interlude, Things from the Flood is the downfall of that dream, the brutal realisation that reality can be unforgiving.

This narrative shift is embodied in oppressive, disembodied urban landscapes, where invasive advertising reigns. Large, decrepit mascots, frozen in grotesque smiles, punctuate the landscape like the remains of forced optimism. Their artificial joviality, corroded by rust and time, reflects the sinister superficiality of a society too busy pretending that everything is fine. Behind these frozen smiles and garish advertisements, teenagers discover a soulless, impersonal world where their distress goes completely unnoticed.

On the edges of this submerged landscape, another form of life emerges: the Vagabond robots. More evolved than their mechanical ancestors, they wander in the forests, at the edge of the cities. These artificial beings, escaped from the production lines, are the symbols of a technology that has become marginal, rejected and misunderstood by society. Stålenhag depicts them with a particular empathy, adorned in colorful clothing with intricate designs, expressing a poignant and silent individuality. Yet the populace sees them as a nuisance, sometimes even as a threat, highlighting this tragic contradiction: we create artificial life only to run away from it, unable to manage our own creations.

But beyond these roaming machines lies an even more disturbing threat: the organic mutation of the machines themselves. In a climate worthy of the works of Cronenberg, these familiar metal structures begin to change, as if contaminated by a strange disease from the depths of the Loop. Fleshy growths appear on the carcasses, the metals melt into viscous semi-organic masses. The boundary between the organic and the mechanical collapses abruptly, creating scenes that are as fascinating as they are terrifying. Here we find Stålenhag’s fascination with bodily horror: the familiar becomes monstrous, the object of consumption is transformed into something strangely alive, threatening and fascinating all at the same time.

Things from the Flood is a subtle and scathing critique of our relationship with strangeness. The inhabitants, especially the teenagers, seem desensitized to these anomalies. Mechanical mutation no longer really terrifies them, as if the bizarre had become their daily life, accepted as a simple reality among many others. The strange no longer raises questions; it is passively integrated into their existence. Thus, the book directly questions our own desensitization to technological strangeness, to the absurdity of consumerism, and to the invisible suffering of the marginalized.

Because what Simon Stålenhag tells us, in this darker and more bitter chapter of his work, is the loss of the initial sense of wonder: the gradual disappearance of this capacity to be amazed by the unknown. It is the poignant story of a generation forced to accept a reality it did not choose, haunted by a lost innocence it tries in vain to regain. It is adolescence in all its magnificent cruelty, stuck between the child we are no longer and the adult we still refuse to become. An adolescence mirroring our own society, where we too end up silently accepting the dysfunctions around us, because we have simply stopped fighting against the ordinary strangeness of the world.

Simon Stålenhag does not offer us a simple sequel to his first opus, but a deeper, more disturbing, and also more personal dive into the intimacy of a generation confronted with the loss of meaning and the irreparable. It is a work that continues to haunt you long after you have closed the book, like the hazy memory of a nightmare from which you struggle to wake up completely.

The Electric State: the American nightmare

When you open The Electric State, it’s like crossing the threshold of a feverish dream that keeps repeating itself. You gradually sink into an alternative America, consumed by a slow, insidious apocalypse, where humans have lost themselves in a technological escape that they have not controlled for a long time. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a melancholy road trip, but one in which familiar landscapes gradually twist into nightmarish visions. In this initiatory and disenchanted journey, we follow Michelle, a lonely young woman accompanied by a small yellow robot, traveling through the Mojave Desert towards an enigmatic destination on the west coast. All around them, the landscape is littered with metallic wrecks, monstrous machines, and bodies abandoned to the eternal dream of a virtual reality that has become fatal.

Because here, the cause of the collapse is neither a natural disaster nor nuclear war, but an addictive technology called Neurocaster, created by the company Sentre. Initially designed for military purposes to control combat drones, these virtual reality headsets soon invaded homes. Their promise: to allow everyone to escape from a reality that has become unbearable, to lose themselves in a collective, infinite digital universe where anything is possible. Very quickly, users no longer leave these strange, organically shaped helmets, prisoners of eternal sleep, emaciated skeletons in a final illusion. Their bodies slowly collapse, their lips still moving, as if frozen in a reverie that never ends. A destructive addiction, a macabre fusion of human and machine, until the boundary between the two completely fades away.

This dystopian nightmare is a powerful critique of unbridled consumerism and digital isolation, an ominous prophecy about what happens when humanity loses all sense of proportion. Stålenhag does not seek so much to denounce head-on as to subtly reveal the extreme consequences of a world devoured by its own desires, where technology promised as liberating ultimately becomes the most absolute prison. The users of the Neurocasters, reduced to silent figures with a fixed, vacant stare, embody this terrifying idea of a humanity dispossessed of itself, locked in a permanent illusion of connection, but in reality more alone than ever.

The landscape itself, which unfolds before our eyes like a succession of twilight visions, bears the scars of this dizzying fall. In these surreal scenes, Stålenhag deploys a fascinating aesthetic of contrast, constantly confronting the joyful symbols of triumphant America with their grotesque decomposition. Giant mascots, absurd vestiges of a triumphant commercial culture, slowly rust under the relentless California sun, displaying frozen smiles and optimistic slogans that ring with sinister irony in the face of disaster. The artist plays with a diffuse light, saturated with faded pastel colors, which reinforces this feeling of melancholy, of infinite sadness in the face of a world that has destroyed itself through indifference and greed.

This permanent contrast between the apparent normality of everyday American life and visions of technological horror is one of the great narrative and visual strengths of the work. The machines, omnipresent in every scene, take on strangely childlike forms, at once reassuring and deeply disturbing. Here we find the art of the uncanny, that murky zone where familiar things become disturbing, as if our reality, through a subtle distortion, were revealing its true face: a humanity that has renounced its free will, reduced to the state of passive spectator of a nightmare that it has itself fashioned.

Stålenhag is particularly skilled at visually depicting alienation. The very specific use of light, often filtered by a constant mist or bathed in a twilight glow, reinforces the impression of loneliness and abandonment. The pastel tones, faded pinks and washed-out blues are reminiscent of worn photographic film, reinforcing the feeling that we are observing the degraded remains of a once-glorious society. His images manage to evoke simultaneously a melancholy poetry and an almost Lovecraftian horror: the inhuman silhouettes of the machines and the beings that merge with them stand like grotesque idols, announcing the disastrous fate of a society that has not been able to control its own creations.

Through Michelle and her mechanical companion, the work also subtly addresses the issue of emotional dependence that can arise in a world where everything already seems lost. Their rare exchanges, minimalist but emotionally charged, draw a tenuous form of humanity persisting amidst the ruins. Even in the most desolate scenes, there is always a spark of human warmth, however faint. This is perhaps the full extent of Stålenhag’s narrative genius: knowing how to powerfully evoke the persistent fragility of emotional bonds in an entirely dehumanized setting.

The Electric State is structured like a slow journey into a lost past, to a specific place where Michelle hopes to find meaning or a form of personal redemption. This journey, haunted by images in which horror and beauty merge, culminates in a finale where the artist deliberately chooses to leave ambiguity hanging in the air, inviting each reader to complete the story according to their own sensibilities. The work leaves the reader disturbed, deeply marked by this exploration of the human soul confronted with its own technological demons, and fascinated by the skill with which the artist takes us on this one-way journey. It is a deeply moving meditation on our times, a visceral reflection on the excesses of consumerism and the dangers of our growing dependence on virtual realities. Simon Stålenhag offers us a striking vision of the future, not as a prediction but as a warning: a call to keep our humanity intact, otherwise we risk seeing it dissolve, slowly but irrevocably, in the cold bowels of our own technological dreams.

The Labyrinth: A reflection on guilt

With this fourth installment, Simon Stålenhag crosses a new frontier, leaving the familiar landscapes of his usual retro-futurism to delve into a more abstract, cosmic, almost metaphysical apocalypse. Here, the end of the world is not a spectacular catastrophe, but a whisper, discreet, elusive, borne by the silent arrival of strange black spheres floating in the sky, enigmatic and impenetrable. Like dark stars, their presence slowly alters the Earth’s atmosphere, gradually transforming the planet into a desert of ammonia and ash, where all life as we know it fades away in slow agony.

These spheres remain unexplained and inexplicable: they represent the very essence of cosmic horror, that overwhelming feeling that humanity is facing something so vast, so alien, that it can never fully comprehend it. In this sense, The Labyrinth is close to the universe of Lovecraft, where the immensity of the cosmos brutally reminds humans of their insignificance. This existential impotence seeps into the earth itself, which becomes hostile like a distant planet, transforming once familiar places into strangely oppressive territories.

It is precisely this idea of the familiar made sinister, this Freudian notion of the uncanny, which gives the work its very special atmosphere. It is found with almost suffocating intensity in the underground installation of Kungshall, the last refuge of a humanity condemned to live underground. Kungshall is clean, organized, perfectly rational in appearance, but precisely this clinical and sanitized perfection hides a terrifying truth. Each overly white corridor, each overly empty room evokes a dull anxiety, an abstract threat reminiscent of the visceral uneasiness of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As in this cinematic masterpiece, the horror comes not so much from the visible things as from the diffuse feeling that something terrible has happened here, something that the white walls and cold lighting unsuccessfully attempt to hide.

It is in this oppressive setting that we follow the three main characters – two siblings employed at Kungshall, and a child taken in among the refugees rejected at the gates of the sanctuary. The narrative is carried by a constant psychological tension, maintained by the protagonists’ dull guilt. For here, human ethics have been sacrificed for the sake of cold and calculated survival. Faced with the massive influx of refugees desperately seeking protection, the bunker employees had to make an atrocious choice: to erect an impenetrable border, patrolled by menacing robots and ruthless guards, violently repelling those seeking help. It is an impossible choice, a rational but inhumane decision that will haunt the survivors forever, burdened with unbearable guilt.

This guilt is at the very heart of the work, with each character being consumed by their own moral contradictions and their own burden of remorse. The necessary cruelty, this horrific act performed to preserve the last vestige of humanity, raises an essential, uncomfortable question: how much humanity are we willing to lose in order to save it? In desperately seeking to avoid physical extinction, the protagonists of The Labyrinth may be condemning themselves to another form of extinction, that of their own humanity.

Around them, the earth continues its slow mutation. As in the fascinating universe of Alex Garland’s Annihilation (adapted from the work of Jeff VanderMeer), nature and technology merge in unpredictable ways, giving rise to aberrant life forms, organisms halfway between the biological and the mechanical. These organic mutations, as spectacular as they are repulsive, create a landscape worthy of a biological nightmare where the boundary between living and non-living disappears completely. The grotesque strangeness that takes hold of the outside world thus reflects the moral and emotional confusion of the characters, as if the landscape itself were a mirror of their inner turmoil.

This idea of confusion, of psychological confinement, literally takes shape in the image of the labyrinth, a recurring element in the work. It is both concrete, a structure from a video game the child plays, and symbolic, perfectly representing the mental state of the characters. Stuck in their own choices, haunted by their traumatic memories, they wander through an inner labyrinth with no obvious exit, desperately searching for a way out that they may never find. Here, the labyrinth is much more than a simple setting; it is a powerful metaphor for mental confinement, unresolved trauma, and ethical dilemmas that go round and round in the human mind without ever reaching a reassuring conclusion.

By diving into the heart of existential and psychological horror, Simon Stålenhag has created a particularly dark and complex work with The Labyrinth. A powerful reflection on the ethical limits of humanity confronted with its imminent extinction, a meditation on the guilt that necessarily accompanies any impossible choice. More than a traditional post-apocalyptic tale, The Labyrinth is a fascinating exploration of the human psyche trapped by its own mistakes and its own cruelty. A work that, long after closing its pages, continues to haunt those who have dared to venture into it, leaving them alone to face these essential questions: how far would we be willing to go to survive? And, above all, would it be worth it?

Simon Stålenhag’s major themes

Technology vs Humanity

Simon Stålenhag’s entire body of work revolves around a fundamental tension, the one that opposes, or rather connects, humans to their own technological creations. But in his universe, this technology never completely liberates: it imprisons, it corrupts, it alienates. Machines appear first as fascinating tools, often designed with childlike ingenuity, but then quickly reveal their devious power and their propensity to escape control.

In Stålenhag’s work, humans are confronted with a kind of permanent technological tragedy: unable to abandon their inventions, even when they alienate them, they condemn themselves to endless dependence. In Tales from the Loop, mechanical marvels initially perceived with naivety slowly become sources of silent anxiety, subtly altering the landscape, reality, to the point of profoundly blurring the boundary between childhood and the adult world. In The Electric State, this idea is taken to the extreme: the addictive technology of the Neurocasters literally imprisons the minds, transforming users into empty shells. Human and machine then merge into a macabre unity, showing that when technological mastery escapes humans, it doesn’t just harm them, it absorbs them, dissolving them in an artificial reality from which there is no possible return.

This critical vision is not just pessimistic, it is deeply nuanced. For in Stålenhag’s work, technology always remains ambivalent: fascinating and frightening, a bearer of hope as much as of dread. It is a subtle but constant warning, reminding us that by trying to tame the future at all costs, humans risk losing their souls. This insoluble tension between the promises of technology and its ability to dispossess us is undoubtedly at the very heart of the artist’s work: the machine is never completely good or completely bad, it is simply a reflection of our own ambitions, desires and failings.

Childhood, adolescence and the loss of innocence

While technology is the backdrop, childhood and adolescence are the main players. Each of Simon Stålenhag’s books explores with delicacy and melancholy this transitional period between childlike carefree abandon and the painful realization of the adult world. In Tales from the Loop, the childlike gaze brings a dimension of naive wonder and candid incomprehension in the face of technological upheavals: children play in the ruins of progress, seeing wonders to explore in the abandoned machines, where adults only perceive mechanical waste. It is a world in which technology has not yet shattered dreams, but in which the first cracks are already appearing.

This fragile innocence disappears abruptly in Things from the Flood. Here, adolescence is approached in all its emotional complexity, tinged with disillusionment and sadness. Teenagers no longer see technology as a miracle but as a failure, a promise unfulfilled. Their disenchantment is on a par with the promises of their childhood, which they now understand as an illusion, a lie. The transformation of machines into grotesque living organisms embodies this violent loss of innocence, the irreversible shift towards the awareness of reality, brutal and with no turning back.

Stålenhag thus shows how the transition to adulthood is never painless, how it is always accompanied by a bitter nostalgia for a time of innocence when everything still seemed possible. But paradoxically, it is always through the eyes of these young characters that we best perceive the reality of the world. By retaining a sense of childhood in their eyes, they become capable of grasping the silent tragedies of their respective worlds with heartbreaking acuity.

Melancholy and universal nostalgia

If the visual world of Simon Stålenhag is so fascinating, it is undoubtedly because he manages to capture a strange and universal nostalgia, a melancholy that goes far beyond geographical or temporal boundaries. His works evoke an era that we have never known, but which nevertheless seems profoundly familiar, as if he had captured something essential, a collective memory buried deep within each of us.

The key to this feeling lies in a clever visual alchemy. First, the light: Stålenhag favors faded pastel tones, eternal twilights, hazy horizons where one can barely make out the outlines of immense abandoned structures. This diffused and nostalgic light is that of memories, imprecise but charged with poignant emotion. He also plays with depth of field, subtly blurring certain elements to give the impression that we are looking through a foggy window, as if he were capturing fragile and fleeting moments, on the verge of disappearing forever.

But what makes this feeling so powerful is also the way it creates a dialogue between the everyday and the strange: he always places his characters in ordinary settings, anonymous suburbs, empty roads, silent forests, which he intersperses with unexpected technological elements. It is this stark contrast between the reassuringly ordinary and the ominously strange that creates such strong emotional tension, an almost aching nostalgia for a time that never was, but which we miss terribly.

Ultimately, Simon Stålenhag manages to create this universal feeling because he never really talks about the past or the future: he talks about time itself, about the way we remember, about our lost dreams and forgotten promises. His works are not only beautiful, they are deeply human, they resonate within us like the scattered fragments of a dream that we desperately try to piece together, without ever fully succeeding.

Behind the rusty robots, desolate landscapes and solitary figures that populate his books, Stålenhag constantly reminds us that we are all trying to find something: a lost innocence, a dream future, a fragile humanity constantly threatened by the threat of being overwhelmed by technology. It is these themes, treated with rare subtlety and unique visual poetry, that make Simon Stålenhag’s work a strange and magnificent mirror of our own existence.

Marrying nostalgia with narrative minimalism

To fully penetrate the universe of Simon Stålenhag, you must first accept to lose your footing, to slowly slip into this murky space where photography and painting merge, where the most banal realism mixes with the most disturbing visions. Because even before being a narrator, Simon Stålenhag is a painter, a timeless illustrator, capable of condensing an entire universe into a single image.

What is immediately striking when observing his paintings is their almost photographic appearance. The textures are familiar, the landscapes immediately recognizable: from the snowy fields of Sweden to the desert roads of California, the artist summons up a hyperrealist aesthetic that paradoxically reinforces the disturbing unreality of the scenes depicted. Behind this almost clinical precision lies meticulous work on light and color. Each scene seems bathed in a permanent twilight atmosphere, a delicately veiled lighting that gives the impression of a diffuse memory, of a photograph forgotten in a drawer for too long. From faded pastel tones to omnipresent mists, Stålenhag uses light as an emotional material in its own right, enveloping his landscapes in a melancholy sweetness or a subtle anxiety depending on the context. His scenes often evoke those late autumn afternoons when the low sun colors everything in a pale orange or cool pink tone, and reality briefly freezes, as if held in a bubble outside of time.

But Stålenhag’s true genius is not only his technical prowess: it is also his ability to tell a lot with very little. His narration is minimalist, fragmented, almost elliptical. A few sentences are enough to establish a context, an emotion, a memory, sometimes even none at all. Then the evocative power of the visuals takes over, each image seeming to contain a complete story in itself, suggesting complex narratives and deep emotions without ever fully explaining them. In this restraint, this deliberate economy of words, Simon Stålenhag manages to create a resonance infinitely vaster than traditional narration would ever allow. His works thus take on the appearance of artefacts from a fictitious but strangely familiar past, which we intuitively reconstruct from visual fragments, as if we were rediscovering the vestiges of long-vanished civilizations.

Simon Stålenhag draws much of this highly effective narrative minimalism from his deep love of cinema. Several major films have permeated his imagination and directly influenced his visual approach. Thus, the contemplative strangeness of Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky is found in the way he juxtaposes a barely altered natural landscape with decontextualized technological elements, creating an effect of strangeness that Freud would have described as “uncanny familiarity”. Like Tarkovsky, he has a fascination for border zones (some would say liminal spaces), these in-between spaces where ordinary reality falters, revealing deeper and more disturbing truths.

Other cinematic influences clearly mark his visual universe: the dark and suffocating urban desolation of Blade Runner, with its aggressive neon lights and invasive advertising posters; the clinical coldness and biological unease of Cronenberg in Videodrome, where technology viscerally mixes with the human body; or the ghostly, hallucinatory neon lights of the cult film Beyond the Black Rainbow. All these inspirations, brought together under Stålenhag’s digital brush, are transformed into something profoundly original: a coherent visual universe, a personal mythology, a collective dream of which we are all unconsciously a part.

Simon Stålenhag’s imagery resonates strongly thanks to his almost tactile approach to the material: tangled cables evoking organic tentacles, rusty and emaciated metal bodies reminiscent of abandoned skeletons, landscapes overrun by wild vegetation or half-organic, half-technological creatures. Simon Stålenhag does much more than tell illustrated stories: he creates worlds. Entire universes that invite us to lose ourselves, to dream and to reflect deeply on our own societies, on our desires and our fears, on the way in which technology shapes our reality. Every image, every light, every silence in his work has a hidden meaning, waiting patiently for the curious gaze to delve in and discover all its mysteries. It is precisely in this obscure zone, this confusion between what we see and what we feel, that the full power of Simon Stålenhag’s art lies.

What ethical and philosophical lessons can be drawn from the work of Simon Stålenhag?

By breaking down each book in this way, an invisible thread appears, subtly connecting these distinct universes. Simon Stålenhag constructs a narrative trajectory that begins in the naive carefree spirit of childhood and ends in the existential guilt of maturity confronted with the collapse of the world. It is as if each story adds an extra layer of gravity, of painful awareness of the impact of our technological and ethical choices.

In Tales from the Loop, childhood is innocent, curious, almost untouched despite the discreet invasion of mysterious machines. Technology is perceived as a form of misunderstood magic. This initial fascination then evolves with Things from the Flood, where adolescence becomes a time of brutal awakening to negative consequences, embodied by disturbing mutations and growing despair in the face of cynical consumerism and invasive technology.

With The Electric State, innocence disappears completely, giving way to a fully conscious nightmare: humans are no longer just the victims of technology, they have become its prisoners, in a sick symbiosis with it. This unhealthy fusion pushes the previously initiated logic to its extreme, tipping the universe towards an intimate, silent apocalypse, where loneliness and alienation dominate everything.

Finally, The Labyrinth completes this evolution, showing a world where humans must face the direct consequences of their past choices: survival becomes cruel, guilt is omnipresent, and the very ethics of human existence are laid bare in the face of a universe that is now completely beyond human understanding.

Through this coherent and fascinating fresco, Simon Stålenhag encourages us to deeply question our relationship with technology, progress, childhood and memory. His entire body of work seems to subtly warn us against human arrogance, this dangerous belief in our infinite capacity to control what we create. In reality, he tells us, humanity has never fully mastered its inventions; on the contrary, it is often overwhelmed by them, a prisoner of its own desires for perfection, immortality or escape.

Each story holds up a mirror to us: we recognize our own mistakes, our own illusions, our initial naivety in the face of technological promises. The universal nostalgia felt when reading his books perhaps comes from this collective regret, this intuitive realization that we have let something essential slip away in favor of a coldly rational, mechanized and impersonal future.

But even more profoundly, Simon Stålenhag subtly and subtly reminds us that while progress is inevitable, the ethical choices that accompany it are always ours. The real challenge of his works is not so much to avoid technology, but to remain aware of its ambivalent power: liberating and destructive at the same time. Because, in the end, the most important boundary is not between human and machine, or even between innocence and corruption, but between consciousness and blindness.

Through his melancholy landscapes, nightmarish visions and haunted characters, Stålenhag invites us to cultivate a clear-sighted perspective, attentive to what is at stake behind every technological advance, behind every moral choice, behind every childhood memory. And this is undoubtedly the most valuable lesson we can learn from his work: faced with an uncertain future and the deceptive promises of progress, humanity must constantly remind itself that it remains deeply and irrevocably responsible for its own dreams and nightmares.