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

Joost Swarte Serigraphy (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high‑grammage 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, Harleem.
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 artwork will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be sent with tracking (UPS / DPD / DHL / FedEx).

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the work 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 Holland’s most famous 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 is responsible for the design of 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 in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic figures of contemporary comics; his style, which at first glance resembles Hergé and his creations, makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and comic strips than appearing appealing with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations arise with a gap of a couple of decades, Tintin already being a fully consolidated product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities, aesthetically, to what Hergé offered, and he also gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th‑century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only in their imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, which he particularly imprints in his drawings, is that his academic training is industrial design, and that makes the characters stand out more against the background, furnishings, and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to build a story; rather, his drawings are the story itself, his characters more credible, fictionally speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.
That academic background is an investment with which Swarte gifts us the view; it is as if he sometimes returns to design, so that if he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, but the opposite: he tries to sophisticated it, it is a drawn catalog and in full color of products from a furniture store, of tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
When he has the opportunity to draw mechanisms, they come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be set in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere daydreams.
And then there are his characters; let’s start by saying that reading his comics can be somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that is because certain characters are so surreal that they are anthropomorphized animals, two‑footed dogs dressed as humans, or animals that simply talk and reason perfectly like you and me.
It is not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young reckless fellow, not mean, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of puns, mistakes, slips, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be Black, who could be a monkey, and who has a crest that is difficult to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, this one fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad investigator (designer) who, in a sense, evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) of our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (deserving a major lifetime award that he hasn’t received).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and maturity in the 1970s and 1980s; he transmits a Central European culture where there was no reticence about sex and pornography. In this sense, his characters have no modesty or hesitation to appear nude (fully) and with bed scenes, without this being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
From Joost Swarte there is one aspect that stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that goes beyond the illustrator and that I mentioned at the outset; he had the opportunity to truly design and carry out projects, since he designed and executed the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—no need to ask me why—personal reasons, that I would like to visit someday, and I fear I will not get to. 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 a comics artist; his designs span a little of everything—stained glass windows, murals, posters and signs (today they are authentic collectibles), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.