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

Screen print by Joost Swarte (*)
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high-grade cotton vellum paper (300 g/m2).
Hand-signed by the artist.
Includes Certificate of Authenticity (COA).

Specifications:

Dimensions: 70 x 50 cm
Year: 1988
Publisher: Atelier Swarte, Haarlem.
Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been kept in a professional art folder, therefore offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private Collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. The shipment will be tracked (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 December 24, 1947 in Heemstede, is one of the most famous Dutch comic artists. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven and began publishing in his own magazine Modern Papier. He has not limited himself to comics, as he has proven himself a successful designer, architect and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of the Oog & Blik Publishing House, he designed many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Days, and he has established himself as a defender of comics within the art world.

Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic comic artists of contemporary comics; his style, at first glance, resembles Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to ensure the success of characters and comics than to appeal with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947 and is not a contemporary of Hergé; his creations arise with a lag of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.

Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities, in terms of aesthetics, to what Hergé offered, and he also endows some of them with an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin but that did allow, as a veiled goal of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only by imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.

The distinguishing value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which he imbues particularly in his drawings, is that his academic base is that of an industrial designer, and that makes the characters in his panels stronger due to the background, furniture and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to build a story; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictitiously speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.

That academic background is an investment with which Swarte rewards us with sight; it is as if he sometimes returns to being a designer, so if he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object, it is, on the contrary, an attempt to sophisticate it; it is a catalog drawn and in full color of the products of a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings and even fashion.

His mechanisms, when he has the opportunity to draw them, come to life, as if he were the sketch or prototype of something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be put into operation. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs did not remain mere daydreams.

And then there are his characters; let us start from the idea that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that is because certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals with no more than to speak and reason perfectly like you and me.

It is no surprise that one of his most famous characters is hard to define, such as Jopo de Pojo, a young crazy boy, with no malice, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, miscommunications, lapses, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of a black race, who could be a monkey and who has a crest that is tricky to fit into an animal figure.

Another of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad investigator (designer) who evokes in a certain way Professor Bacterio (Mort & Phil) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (in need of an important lifetime award, which he has not received).

We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and maturation in the 70s and 80s, as a transmitter of a Central European culture where there was no shyness about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem showing themselves nude (completely) and with bed scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversion than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout our recent history.

One aspect of Joost Swarte stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and that he pointed to at the start; he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, since he designed the Toneelschuur Theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities, don’t ask me why, personal reasons, that I would like to visit someday and I fear I will not reach. 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 slice as a comics artist; his designs cover a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and placards (now genuine collectibles), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary artist to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.