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

Serigraphy by Joost Swarte (*)
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high-quality 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).
Origin: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard. The shipment will be insured and 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 on 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 to be a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass artist, always recognizable for his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik, he was responsible for the design of many acclaimed Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Day, and has established himself as a defender of comics within the art world.
Undoubtedly, Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics; his style superficially resembles Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing guarantees the success of characters and stories better than appearing attractive with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not coeval with Hergé, and his creations emerged with a gap of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities, aesthetically, to what Hergé offered, and he also endows some of them with an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin but allowing, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children—at least in their imagination—to regions they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive strength of this brilliant Dutch designer is that his academic background is in industrial design, and that makes the composition of his panels emphasize the characters more than the background, furniture, and landscapes that surround them. He does not draw to build a story; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictionally speaking, because his panels have rich expressive detail.
That academic background is an investment that Swarte uses to gift us with a visual feast, as if he occasionally returns to being a designer; when he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object—quite the opposite, he seeks to sophisticated it, it becomes a catalog drawn in full color of products of a furniture store, of tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, when he has the chance to draw them, come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that can be made real, something that, following his instructions, could be put into operation. I don’t know what mechanics knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs don’t stay as a mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the reading of his comics being somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that’s because certain characters are as surreal as humanoid animals—dogs on two legs dressed as humans, or animals with nothing more than talking and reasoning perfectly like you and me.
It’s no surprise that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young mischievous boy who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of puns, mistakes, slips, coincidences… The iconic Jopo de Pojo could be of black race, could be a monkey, and has a tuft that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another character, entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a sort of obsessed (designer) investigator who, in a way, echoes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) by our renowned and insufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, and it hasn’t come).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte; with the breadth of his creation and his maturity in the 70s and 80s, he conveys a Central European culture where sexual matters and pornography were not restricted; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem appearing nude (full), with bedroom scenes, without this being seen as an invitation to promiscuity toward youth. And it’s true, because nothing harms sexual deviance more than trying to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
One aspect that stands out in Joost Swarte in any biography you read is a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and that was hinted at from the start; he had the opportunity to design and execute truly, since he designed the Toneelschuur theater in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those towns—don’t ask me why, personal reasons—that I would like to visit someday and fear I will not reach. His design is at least curious, and I perceive it as a continuation of his comic panels. He has also designed apartment buildings.
Swarte is more than just a comics artist; his designs span a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and placards (today they are genuine collectibles), playing cards, carpets, gift wrap… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator for the evolution of contemporary comics.