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

Joost Swarte serigraphy (*).
Titled “Eindelijk vrijheid”.
Luxury edition on high-grade 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 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 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 for his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Publishing, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of Haarlem’s International Comics Days, and has established himself as a defender of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic cartoonists of contemporary comics; his style, at first glance, bears similarities to Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing better to guarantee character and comic success 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 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 adventure stories, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but they allowed, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century comic artists, to transport children, even if only in imagination, to locales they would hardly visit in reality.
The differential value of this brilliant Dutch draftsman, which he particularly stamps on his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, and that makes the characters in his panels stand out more against the background, furnishings, and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to build a story, but his drawings are the story itself; his characters are more believable, fictively speaking, because his panels have rich expressive detail.
That academic foundation is an investment with which Swarte gifts us the sight; it is as if he wanted to return to design from time to time—when he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object; it is the opposite: he tries to sophisticate it, it becomes a catalog drawn in full color of furniture store products, 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 in motion. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs wouldn’t stay in mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that’s because some characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It’s no surprise that some of his most famous characters are difficult to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young playful troublemaker who falls into mischief without really wanting to, all due to wordplay, mix-ups, 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 tuft that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, truly human this time, is Anton Makassar, a sort of crazy investigator (designer) who evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) of our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (deserving a major lifetime award that has not arrived).
We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte; with the bulk of his creation and maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, he transmits a Central European culture where there was no shame about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty in appearing naked (full-frontal) and with their bed scenes, without being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual perversions than trying to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout our more recent history.
One aspect of Joost Swarte that stands out in any biography you see of him, a dimension that surpasses the draftsman and which he hinted at from the start; he had the opportunity to design and really execute, since he designed Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—don’t ask me why, personal reasons—that I’d love to visit one day, and I fear I won’t make it. 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, much more than, his slice of comic artist; his designs cover a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and placards (which today are authentic collectibles), playing cards, carpets, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary draftsman to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.