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

Joost Swarte screenprint (*)
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 work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. The shipment will be sent with tracking and certified delivery (UPS / DPD / DHL / FedEx).

The shipment will also include transportation 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; he has proven to be 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 Day, and has stood as a champion of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly, Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic contemporary comic artists; his style, at first glance, bears similarities to Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee character and comic success than resembling 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 lag of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully established product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain aesthetic similarities to what Hergé offered, and he also gives some of them an adventure narrative, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which allowed, as a veiled objective of many 20th‑century cartoonists, to convey to children, even if only in imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which he particularly imparts to his drawings, is that his academic base is industrial design, and that makes the background, furniture, and landscapes in his panels more prominent. He does not draw to build a story; rather, his drawings are the story itself, his characters more believable, fictitiously speaking, because his panels have rich expressive content.
That academic background is an investment with which Swarte gifts us with a visual feast, as if he sometimes returns to design. If he must draw a machine, it is not a simple object; on the contrary, he tries to sophisticated it, it is a colorfully drawn catalog 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 drafting the sketch or prototype of something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be brought to life. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs do not stay as mere reveries.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that is because certain characters are as surreal as if they were anthropomorphized animals—two‑legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals who speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
No wonder some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young silly boy, not malevolent, who gets into trouble without really meaning to, the result of wordplay, mistakes, slips, coincidences… For instance, the iconic Jopo de Pojo could be Black, could be a monkey, and has a crest that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another character, this one fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad researcher (designer) who in some ways evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadello y Filemón) from our renowned and under‑recognized Ibáñez (needs a major lifetime award but does not receive it).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his work in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying Central European culture where there was no prudery about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no embarrassment or issue appearing naked and with bed scenes, which should not be understood as an invitation to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And indeed, nothing is worse for sexual depravity than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body—those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout our recent history.
One aspect that stands out in any biography of Joost Swarte is a dimension that surpasses the cartoonist and pointed to at the start; he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, as he designed the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—don’t ask me why, personal reasons—that I would love to visit someday and 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 than just a cartoonist; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass windows, murals, posters and prints (today genuine collectible items), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator for conceiving the evolution of contemporary comics.