Watching Stalenhag's Dreams

There is something brilliant about Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag’s works. He seamlessly brings retro and the future; the mundane and the striking together. Abandoned robots, mysterious machinery and even dinosaurs roaming the hyperrealist humdrum of the Swedish countryside has garnered him legions of fans.

He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from films, commercials and book covers to art directing and concepting for video games. He first began publishing on social media. In 2014 he published his first book -Tales from the Loop- in which the artwork is complemented by a novel-length written story. It got something of a cult following that it's no surprise Amazon Prime recently turned Stålenhag’s art into a TV series as a response to Netflix’s Stranger Things. The first season directed by Mark Romanek got rave reviews, and fans are sitting tight for the second season. Stålenhag published two more narrative artbooks, "Things from the Flood" in 2016 (a sequel to "Tales from the Loop") and "The Electric State" in 2017.

Stålenhag’s paintings tell the story of an alternate Sweden in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In parallel to the real-life decline of the Swedish welfare state, large machines slowly fail. And the eventual result of this remains a mystery; a massive particle accelerator built underground — dubbed “The Loop” — cause “strange and mysterious” machines and events to occur. More recently, Stålenhag has covered the western United States in his third book, The Electric State. This is not connected to his Loop books. The book is set in 1997, following a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot as they explore an alternate United States “where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline.”

They are the product of his childhood memories -- growing up in suburban Stockholm watching sci-fi movies. “You cannot say much about my life by looking at Tales From the Loop. But it feels personal since it feels very harmonious with my feelings when I was growing up,” said Stalenhag in a video call interview. In an hour long conversation we also talked about how he draws the line between what’s private and what’s personal, why he is not interested in making future predictions and why he doesn’t consider his art to be dystopian. Now, welcome to the haunting world of Simon Stalenhag.

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You said before that “it can ruin art to be unambiguous”.  Is this also partially why you stay away from making future predictions?

Yes, I think I want to give the feeling that you open a book into a dream and it is like watching somebody’s dream. The difference between a dream and a vision is that a dream has its own entity, you cannot control it. I  don’t like controlled intelligent narratives. I am sure there are people who can create that knowing exactly what they are saying and how it should be interpreted. But isn’t the mind such a mystery? If I started trying to analyse things, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I would just be too critical.

I understand, but you have this work with giant Trumps for example; can you really say that you are not making any political or social commentary with it?

Well Trump is an asshole, that is my message. (Laughs) But I wouldn’t use that in a book because it is like a political cartoon. And I don’t do that. So it is something I did on Twitter, somebody sent me that photo and said “Can I have a pintogram?” and I did it in 5 mins. And I said, “No you can have a trumpover” I wouldn’t spend more time on something like that because it’s flat. It is good for a tweet. That’s what it is.  

For the full interview: https://www.212-magazine.com/tr/issue/future-shock PHOTOGRAPHY BY FREDRIK BERNHOLM