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, Harleem.
Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been kept in a professional art folder, thus offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private Collection.

The artwork will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard. The shipment will be sent with tracking (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 purchaser.

(*) 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 designer, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Press, he was responsible for the design of many awarded Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Day, and has stood as a defender of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic comic artists of contemporary comics; his style, at first glance, resembles Hergé and his creations, and it makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and stories than looking appealing with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947, not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations emerge with a lag 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 grants some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that allowed, as an unspoken goal of many 20th-century comic artists, to transport children, even if only by imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinguishing feature of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which he particularly imprints on his drawings, is that his academic foundation is industrial design, and that makes the characters gain prominence in the composition of his panels, over 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 wealth.
That academic background is an investment with which Swarte gifts us a view; it is as if he sometimes wants to return to designer, if he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, it is quite the opposite, he tries to sophisticated it—it is a catalog drawn and in full color of products in a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, when 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 put into operation. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere daydreaming.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that is because some characters are so surreal that they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals having conversations and reasoning perfectly like you and me.
It is not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; thus Jopo de Pojo, a young reckless boy who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of wordplay, mistakes, lapses, coincidences… For example, 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 of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a sort of crazy investigator (designer) who evokes in a certain way Professor Bacterio (Mort & Phil) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (deserving a major lifetime award, which he has not received).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 70s and 80s, conveying a Central European culture where there was no coyness about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no scruples or problem appearing naked (full-frontal) and with bed scenes, without that being interpreted as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth.
And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than to perceive something harmful in something as natural as our body; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
One aspect of Joost Swarte stands out in any biography you read of him, a dimension that surpasses the cartoonist and which was pointed out at the beginning; he had the opportunity to design and actually execute, since he designed the Toneelschuur theater 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 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 a comics artist; his designs cover a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and billboards (which today are genuine collectible objects), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Without a doubt, a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.