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

Screen print by Joost Swarte (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on heavyweight 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 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 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 also proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass designer, always recognizable for his clear line. As co-owner of the Oog & Blik publishing house he is 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 contemporary comic artists; his style appears to resemble Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and comics than appearing attractive through preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations emerge with a delay 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 with an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children—if only with their imagination—to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.

The differentiating value of this brilliant Dutch illustrator, which he instills particularly in his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, and that makes the characters stand out more than the backgrounds, furniture, and landscapes that accompany them. He does not draw to build a story; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictively speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.

That academic heritage is an investment with which Swarte gifts us the view; it is as if he sometimes returns to design, for when he draws a machine it is not a simple object, it is quite the opposite: he tries to sophisticate it, it becomes a colorfully drawn catalog of the products of a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.

His mechanisms, whenever he has the opportunity to draw them, come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be set in motion. I do not know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs would not stay in mere daydreams.

And then there are his characters; let us start from the idea that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, dog-like on two legs dressed as humans, or animals that merely talk 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 mischievous young fellow who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, mistakes, slips, coincidences… For instance, the iconic Jopo de Pojo could be black, could be a monkey, and has a crest that is difficult to fit into an animal figure.

Another one of his characters, fully human this time, is Anton Makassar, a sort of mad investigator (designer) who in some way evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo and Filemón) by our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, and it hasn’t come).

There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the core of his creation and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying a Central European culture where there was no hesitation about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters show no shame or problem with appearing nude (completely) and with bed scenes, without this being understood as an inducement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.

From Joost Swarte there is one aspect that stands out in any biography you read about him, a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and that I noted from the start: he had the opportunity to design and actually execute, for he designed 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 I fear I may not. 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, much more than a comics artist; his designs span a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and billboards (today true collectibles), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.