About the Artist
Lasse Paldanius
Lasse Paldanius is a freelancer graphic designer, journalist, and visual artist from Finland. He grew up in the Helsinki metropolitan area and lives nowadays in Rovaniemi, Lapland, right next to the Arctic Circle.
He holds a master of arts degree in graphic design and works as an art director in different regional branding projects, as an art exhibition editor at the local university, creating his own artistic projects on the side. In addition, he is working on a doctoral thesis in the field of graphic design at the University of Lapland’s Faculty of Art & Design.
In 2015 he established The Crosspunk Wanderer, an independent art project to unveil his dark imaginative “crosspunk style” works to the public. His digital paintings contain influences from the science fiction subgenres steampunk, cyberpunk, and dystopia as well as visual references to Christian symbolism, occultism, mysticism, Sami mythology, Wild West romanticism, the Middle Ages and other historical eras. His artwork includes portraits of cyborgs, robots, and other kinds of wanderers inside alternative science fantasies where philosophy, science, religion, and entertainment can encounter one another in different ways. Since 2015, The Crosspunk Wanderer art show has been featured in several Finnish cities and towns. It has received positive feedback for its dark, anxious aesthetics and visual originality.
At the moment The Crosspunk Wanderer is seeking new artistic endeavors, experiments, and forms to come. Please give your encouragement and support by following it on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/crosspunkwanderer/) or Instagram (@the_crosspunk_wanderer) and witness the latest twists!
Lasse writes that his art gracing the cover of this issue, “Immaculate Atom Heart” (Digital painting, 2015, 27.5 x 40.5 in), is “sort of a gloomy (anti)atheistic icon, a reinterpretation of the traditional ‘Immaculate Heart’ theme of Christian art. It aims to reflect, question, and deconstruct the similarities, differences, confrontations, and schisms between religious and scientific worldviews. The work represents a contradictory paradigm of today’s and the future’s thinking man, a mystic construct of the New Age, a portrait of Her Sacral, Scientific, and Immaculate Highness.”
“Immaculate Atom Heart” by Lasse Paldanius, © 2015
