Joost Swarte - Eindelijk vrijheid - Silkscreen ** HANDSIGNED+COA **

Joost Swarte's serigraphy.
Titled 'Finally Freedom'.
Luxury edition on high-weight cotton vellum paper (300g/m2).
Hand-signed by the artist.
Includes Certificate of Authenticity (COA).


Specifications

Dimensions: 70 x 50 cm
Year: 1988
Editor: Atelier Swarte, Harleem.
Condition: Excellent (this artwork has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been kept in a professional art folder, so it is offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private Collection.

The artwork will be handled with care and packaged in a reinforced cardboard box. Shipping will be certified with a tracking number (UPS/DPD/DHL/FedEx).

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the artwork with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

Joost Swarte, born on December 24, 1947, in Heemstede, is one of the most famous comic artists in the Netherlands. He studied at the Eindhoven Design Academy and began publishing in his own magazine, Modern Papier. He has not limited himself to comics, as he has also established himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line style. As a co-owner of Oog & Blik Publishing, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comic Strip Days and has established himself as an advocate for comics within the art world.
Without a doubt, Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics. His style appears similar to Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing is better for ensuring the success of characters and comic strips than looking attractive with pre-existing models. In this regard, Swarte, who is still alive today and was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé; his works emerged with a gap of a couple of decades, with Tintin already being a fully established product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities, in terms of aesthetics, to what Hergé offered, and also endows some of them with adventure stories, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintín's, but which nonetheless served, as a hidden goal of many comic artists of the 20th century, to transport children—at least through their imagination—to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch artist, who particularly emphasizes his drawings, is that his academic background is in industrial design. This makes the characters in his comic strips more prominent, supported by the backgrounds, furniture, and landscapes that compose them. He does not create his drawings to build a story; rather, his drawings are the story itself. His characters are more believable, fictitiously speaking, because his panels possess a great expressive richness.
That academic background is an investment with which Swarte gifts us the view; it's as if he wants to turn into a designer from time to time. When he has to draw a machine, it's not a simple object—quite the opposite. He tries to make it sophisticated; it's a drawn, full-color catalog of products from a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, when he has the opportunity to draw them, come to life; it's as if they are sketches or prototypes of something that can become reality, of something that, following his instructions, could be put into motion. I do not know what knowledge Swarte might have about mechanics, but I am sure his designs did not remain mere daydreams.
And then there are their characters; let's start with the fact that their comic strips are somewhat erratic, surreal, maybe eccentric, but it's because certain characters are as surreal as they are: anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed like humans, or animals that simply speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It is no surprise that some of his most famous characters are difficult to define; such is Jopo de Pojo, a young crazy guy, harmless, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all due to double meanings, misunderstandings, distractions, and coincidences... The iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of black race, could be a monkey, and has a crest that is also hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of crazy investigator (designer) who somewhat evokes Professor Bacterio (from Mortadelo and Filemón) by our renowned yet underappreciated Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, but he hasn't received one).
We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with most of his work and maturity in the 70s and 80s, as a transmitter of Central European culture where they didn't shy away from sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem appearing nude (completely) and in bed scenes, without this being understood as an incitement to promiscuity among the youth. And it's true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than wanting to see something harmful in something as natural as our bodies; these repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
Joost Swarte has one aspect that stands out in any biography you read about him, a dimension that surpasses the cartoonist and that I mentioned at the beginning; he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, as he designed the Toneelschuur theater in Haarlem. Haarlem (Netherlands) is one of those cities, I don't ask me why, for personal reasons, that I would like to visit someday, and I fear I won't get there. His design is, at the very least, curious, and I perceive it as a continuation of his comics. He has also designed apartment buildings.
Swarte is more, much more than his comic artist’s share; his designs cover a bit of everything—stained glass windows, murals, posters and placards (which today are genuine collectibles), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly, a necessary artist to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.