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

Screen print by Joost Swarte (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxurious 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, so it is offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. Shipping will be tracked (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 comics illustrators. He studied at the Eindhoven Academy of Design 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 acclaimed Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Festival of Comic Strip, and has established himself as a defender of comics within the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic creators of contemporary comics; his style superficially resembles that of Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and stories than looking appealing with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations emerge with a gap of about two decades, with Tintin already a fully established product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain aesthetic similarities to what Hergé offered, and he also endows some of them with an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th‑century comic artists, to transport children, even if only with imagination, to latitudes they would rarely visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch artist, with which he particularly imbues his drawings, is that his academic base is industrial design, and that makes the characters in his panels stand out more against the backgrounds, 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 background is an investment with which Swarte gifts us with what we see; it’s as if he occasionally returns to being a designer, and when he has to draw a machine it isn’t a simple object; it’s the opposite, he seeks to sophisticated it, it’s a drawn catalog of the products of a furniture store, of tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, whenever he has the chance to draw them, come to life, as if he were the sketch or prototype of something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be brought to life. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let’s start from the fact that reading his comic strips is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that’s because certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two‑legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals with nothing more that speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It’s no surprise that one of his most famous characters is hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young trickster, without malice, who gets into trouble even though he doesn’t really want to, all the result of puns, mistakes, 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 hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a sort of crazy researcher (designer) who in some ways evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and underappreciated Ibáñez (needs a lifetime achievement award and does not get it).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his work and maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying a Central European culture where there was no wiggle room in sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem appearing nude (in the raw) and with bedroom scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth. And that’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
There is one aspect of Joost Swarte that stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and which I mentioned at the outset; 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 I’d like to visit someday and 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, much more than, his field as a comics artist; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and placards (today true collector’s items), playing cards, carpets, gift wrap… Without a doubt a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.