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

Serigrafía by Joost Swarte (*)
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, Haarlem.
Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been stored in a professional art portfolio, therefore offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. Shipping will be by registered mail with tracking number (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 the most famous comic artists in the Netherlands. 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 established himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of the Oog & Blik publishing house, he was responsible for the design of many awarded Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Days, and has established himself as a defender of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics; his style, at first glance, resembles Hergé and his creations, and it makes sense because nothing better to ensure the success of characters and stories than to look appealing with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947 and is not a contemporary of Hergé; his creations emerged 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 gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that 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 differentiating value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which his drawings particularly imprint, is that his academic base is industrial design, and that makes the background, furniture, and landscapes in his panels more forceful than the characters. 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 blesses us with the view; it is as if he sometimes wants to become a designer again, if he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, on the contrary, he tries to sophisticated it; it is a colorfully drawn 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, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become a reality, something that, following his instructions, could be set in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs wouldn’t stay in mere daydreams.
And then there are his characters; to start from the reading of his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that, nothing more than that, speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It’s not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young prankster, without malice, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, misunderstandings, 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 hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, this one fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad investigator (designer) who vaguely evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major prize in life and he hasn’t received it).
There is also an intriguing 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 minced matter about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty or problem appearing naked (completely) and with bedroom scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity among the youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than trying to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
There is one aspect of Joost Swarte that stands out in any biography you read about him, a dimension that surpasses the draftsman and that pointed to the beginning; he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, since he designed the Toneelschuur theater 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 won’t.
His design is, at least, curious and I perceive it as a continuation of his comics. He has also designed apartment buildings.
Swarte is more than just a comics artist; his designs span a little of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and banners (which today are authentic collector’s items), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.