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

Serigraphy 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, 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 work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. 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 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, having proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass artist, always recognizable for his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Publishing, he is responsible for the design of many Dutch award-winning 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 comic artists of contemporary comics; his style superficially resembles Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and comics than appealing models preexisting. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations emerge with a gap of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities in aesthetics to what Hergé offered, and some of them also receive an adventurous backstory, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which allowed, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only with their imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which his drawings particularly imprint, is that his academic training is industrial design, and that makes the characters in his panels stand out more against 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 gifts us the sight; it is as if he wanted to return to being a designer from time to time, if he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, it is the opposite, 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, whenever he has the chance to draw them, come to life, as if it were the sketch or prototype of something that can become real, of something that, following his instructions, could be put in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let’s start by noting that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are so surreal that they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals with nothing more than they speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It is no surprise that some of his most famous characters are hardly definable; thus Jopo de Pojo, a young silly boy, harmless, who gets into trouble without really meaning to, all the fruit of double meanings, missteps, oversights, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be black, who could be a monkey, and who has a tuft that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, this one fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of crazy investigator (designer) who in some way evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major prize in life and it has not arrived).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and maturation in the 70s and 80s, transmitting a Central European culture where there were no prudes about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty nor problem appearing naked (full-frontal) and in bed scenes, without this being understood as encouragement to promiscuity among the youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravations than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
One aspect that stands out in Joost Swarte in any biography you see of him is a dimension that goes beyond the draftsman and that was hinted at from the start; 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 may 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 field of cartooning; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and signs (today true collector’s items), playing cards, rugs, gift wrap paper… Undoubtedly a necessary cartoonist to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.