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

Screen print by Joost Swarte (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high‑gsm 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. The shipment will be insured with a tracking number (UPS / DPD / DHL / FedEx).

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the artwork, 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 established himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of the Oog & Blik Publishing, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Days, and has stood as a defender of comics within the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics; his style superficially resembles Hergé and his creations, and it makes sense because nothing better to guarantee the success of characters and comics 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 arise with a lag of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product.
Swarte creates some of his characters with certain stylistic similarities to what Hergé offered, and he also gives some of them an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but which allowed, as a veiled goal of many 20th‑century comic artists, to transport children, even if only in their imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, expressed particularly in his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, which 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 more credible, fictitiously speaking, because his panels have rich expressive detail.
That academic groundwork is an investment with which Swarte gifts us with sight; it is as if he sometimes returns to design, and when he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object, but the opposite: he tries to sophisticate it, it becomes a catalog drawn in full color of products from a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, whenever 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 set in motion. I don’t know what knowledge about mechanics Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics can be a bit erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as humanoid 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, mischievous boy who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of wordplay, missteps, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be Black, could be a monkey, and has a tuft that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another character, this one totally human, is Anton Makassar, a sort of crazy researcher (designer) that evokes, in a way, Professor Bacterio (Mort & Phil) from our renowned and underappreciated Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, and it hasn’t arrived).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his work and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s presenting a Central European culture where there was no fear in sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty or problem appearing nude and in bed scenes, without this being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than trying to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.
One aspect that stands out in Joost Swarte in any biography you read is a dimension that goes beyond the draftsman and that I mentioned at the start; he had the opportunity to truly design and execute, in fact designing the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—don’t ask me why; personal reasons I would like to visit someday and fear I may not—that I would find fascinating. 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 a comics artist; his designs span multiple fields: stained glass, murals, posters and placards (today authentic collecting objects), playing cards, carpets, gift wrap… Undoubtedly a much‑needed illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.