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

Screenprint 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, 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. Shipping will be tracked and certified (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 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; he has proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass designer, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik publishers, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comic Strip Days and has established himself as a defender of comics within the art world.
Undoubtedly, Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics; his style, at first glance, resembles Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing guarantees the success of characters and comics better than appearing attractive with pre-existing models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947, not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations originate with a lag 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 some of them are given an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which did allow, as an unspoken goal of many 20th-century comic artists, to take children, even if only in imagination, to latitudes they would rarely visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, which he imparts especially to his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, and that makes the characters stand out more in the composition of his panels, by the background, furniture, and landscapes that constitute 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 gifts us the sight; it’s as if he sometimes returns to being a designer, and when he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, but the opposite: he strives to sophisticatedly render it, a fully drawn catalog of products from a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
When he has the opportunity to draw mechanisms, they come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become a reality, something that, following his instructions, could be put into motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere daydreams.
And then there are his characters; one starts from the reading of his comics being somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that’s because certain characters are as surreal as they are humanized animals, dogs on two legs dressed like humans, or animals with nothing more than they 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 goofy boy, without malice, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, misunderstandings, mishaps, coincidences… The iconic Jopo de Pojo could be of a black race, could be a monkey, and has a crest that’s tricky to fit into an animal figure.
Another character, this one fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad investigator (designer) who recalls in some way the professor Bacterio (Mortadello and Filemón) from our renowned and underappreciated Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award and hasn’t received it).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, he transmits a Central European culture where there were no scruples about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty or problem appearing naked (fully) and with bed scenes, without implying promiscuity toward the youth. And it’s true, because 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.
From Joost Swarte there is one aspect that stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that goes beyond the illustrator and which pointed to at the beginning; he had the opportunity to truly design and execute, since 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 I fear I won’t. 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 cover a little of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and billboards (today they are genuine collectible objects), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.