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

Joost Swarte Serigraphy (*)
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid” (Finally freedom).
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 stored in a professional art folder, hence offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. The shipping will be sent with 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 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 also proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass designer, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Publishing he is responsible for the design of many awarded Dutch 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 contemporary comic artists; his style, at first glance, bears some resemblance to Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee character and comic success than appearing attractive with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations come with a gap of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain aesthetic similarities to what Hergé offered, and also gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that did permit, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only in their imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The differentiating value of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, with which he especially stamps his drawings, is that his academic base is industrial design, and that makes the background, furniture, and landscapes in his panels more prominent than the characters. 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 view; it is as if he sometimes wants to return to being a designer. If he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object; on the contrary, he tries to sophisticate it, it becomes a catalog drawn in full color 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; it is as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be brought to life. I don’t know what knowledge about mechanics Swarte might have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere daydreams.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but it is that certain characters are as surreal as they are humanized animals, two‑legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that simply talk 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 mischief-maker, without malice, who gets into trouble not really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, mispronunciations, slips, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of black race, who could be a monkey, and who has a crest that is difficult to fit into an animal figure.
Another character, this one totally human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of (designer) investigator who evokes in a way Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, but it has not come).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 70s and 80s, he transmits a Central European culture where there was no hesitation in sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem appearing nude (full frontal) and with their bed scenes, without that being understood as incitement to promiscuity toward the youth.
And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout our recent history.
From Joost Swarte there is one aspect that stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and that he pointed to at the beginning; he had the opportunity to design and really execute, since 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 won’t get to. 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 his slice of cartoonist; his designs cover a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and placards (which today are genuine collecting objects), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a needed cartoonist to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.