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

Serigraphy 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 matted 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 packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be sent with tracking (UPS / DPD / DHL / FedEx).

The shipment will also include transit 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 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, having established himself as a successful designer, architect and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Press he is responsible for the design of many Dutch award-winning books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Day, 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 appears to resemble Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better ensures the success of characters and comic stories than appearing appealing through preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947 and is not a contemporary of Hergé; his creations emerged a couple of decades later, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.

Swarte creates some of his characters with a certain similarity, aesthetically, to what Hergé offered, and some of them are given adventure stories, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which still allowed, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, if only through imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.

The distinctive quality of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, which he imparts particularly to his drawings, is that his academic background is in industrial design, and that makes the figures in his panels stand out more against the background, furniture and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to tell a story; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictionally speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.

That academic baggage is an investment with which Swarte gifts us with visual delight; it’s as if he sometimes returns to design, and if he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, quite the opposite, he tries to sophisticated it, it becomes a drawn catalog of furniture store products, tools, machines, cars, buildings and even fashion.

When he has the opportunity to draw them, his mechanisms come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could be brought to life, something that, following his instructions, could be set in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs wouldn’t stay in mere reverie.

And then there are his characters; let us start with the fact that reading 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 simply speak and reason as you and I do.

It is not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a reckless young fellow, not evil, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, the result of double meanings, mistakes, slips, coincidences… The iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of Black race, could be a monkey, and 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 researcher (designer) that somewhat evokes Profesor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) by our renowned and underappreciated Ibáñez (he deserves a major award in life and has not received it).

We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying a Central European culture where there were no prudes about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no scruples about appearing nude (fully) and with bed scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And indeed, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; these repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.

One aspect about Joost Swarte that stands out in any biography you read is a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and which I noted at the beginning; he had the opportunity to truly design and execute, as he designed and built the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—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 comics. 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 signs (today these are genuine items of collection), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a writer-artist necessary to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.