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

Serigraphy by Joost Swarte (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high-quality 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 packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. Shipping 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 Holland’s most famous 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 the Oog & Blik publishing house, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning 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 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 attractive through models that already exist. 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 delay 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 he also gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only through imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.

The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which he imparts particularly to 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, fictionally speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.

That academic baggage is an investment with which Swarte gives us a feast for the eyes, as if he sometimes returns to being a designer; if he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object, on the contrary, he tries to sophisticated it, it is a drawn catalog and in full color of the products in a furniture store, of 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 the prototype of something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be set in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs don’t stay shrouded 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 that is because some characters are so surreal that they are humanized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that simply talk and reason perfectly like you and me.

It is not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hardly definable, such as Jopo de Pojo, a young prankster, not evil, who gets into trouble without really wanting to; all of it the result of double meanings, miscommunications, slips, coincidences… Well, 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 fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad researcher (designer) who evokes, in a certain way, Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (in need of an important lifetime award that he has not received).

There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, as a transmitter of a Central European culture where there was no fear in sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame nor problem appearing nude (full-frontal) and with their bed scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth collective. And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than trying 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 draftsman and which was pointed out from the start; he had the opportunity to design and truly 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 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 a comic artist; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and placards (which today are true collectibles), playing cards, carpets, gift wrap… Undoubtedly a necessary draftsman to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.