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

Serigraphy by Joost Swarte (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxurious 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. The shipment will be sent with tracking number (UPS / DPD / DHL / FedEx)

The shipping 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 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 proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line. As co‑owner of Oog & Blik, he is responsible for the design of many awarded Dutch 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 similar to Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and stories than looking attractive with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé and his creations originate with a lag of a couple of decades, Tintin already being a fully consolidated product.

Swarte creates some of his characters with aesthetic similarities to what Hergé offered, and he also gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which allowed, as a veiled objective of many 20th century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only with imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.

The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch illustrator, which he especially imprints on his drawings, is that his academic background 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 baggage is an investment with which Swarte rewards us with a sight that seems like he wants to turn back to a designer occasionally; when he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object, it is quite the opposite: he tries to sophisticate it, it is a colorfully drawn catalog of the products of a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.

His mechanisms, when given the chance 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 put into operation. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs wouldn’t remain mere daydreams.

And then there are his characters; let us begin by noting that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that some of the characters are so surreal that they are anthropomorphic animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals who speak and reason perfectly like you and me.

It’s not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young prankster, without malice, who gets into trouble without really wanting to; all fruit of double meanings, miscommunications, slip-ups, coincidences… The iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be black, could be a monkey, and whose tuft is hard to fit into an animal figure.

Another of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of crazy investigator (designer) who evokes in some way Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo and Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (deserves a significant lifetime award, yet to come).

There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his work and maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, transmitting a Central European culture where leeway in sex and pornography was not spared; in this sense, his characters have no scruples or problem appearing nude (full-frontal) and with bedroom scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout our recent history.

One aspect of Joost Swarte that stands out in any biography you read about him is a dimension that goes beyond the draftsman and was noted from the start; he had the opportunity to design and execute truly, as he designed Toneelschuur theater in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities, don’t ask me why, personal reasons 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 comic artist; his designs span a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and signs (today true collectibles), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a designer who contributed to shaping the evolution of contemporary comics.