Joost Swarte - Eindelijk vrijheid - Silkscreen - 50x70 ** HANDSIGNED+COA **

Serigraphy 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 packaged in reinforced cardboard. 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 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 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 proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass draughtsman, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik, he is responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of Haarlem’s International Comics Day, and he has established himself as a defender of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic contemporary comic artists; his style superficially resembles Hergé and his creations, which makes sense because nothing helps a character and comic succeed like looking appealing with pre-existing models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947, is not a contemporary of Hergé, and his creations come with a couple of decades lag, 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-driven backstory, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century graphic artists, to transport children, at least in imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive quality of this brilliant Dutch illustrator, which he particularly instills in 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; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, to speak fictionally, because his panels have great expressive richness.
That academic baggage is an investment with which Swarte gifts us sight; it’s 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 elaborate it, it becomes a colorfully drawn catalog of products from a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.
His mechanisms, whenever he has the chance to draw them, come to life; it’s as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could be made real, something that, following his instructions, could be put in motion. I don’t know what knowledge about mechanics Swarte may have, but I’m sure his designs wouldn’t stay in mere reverie.
And then there are his characters; let’s start from the idea that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that simply speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It’s not surprising that some of his most famous characters are hard to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young goofy kid, without malice, who gets into trouble without really meaning to, all due to puns, miscommunications, forgetfulness, coincidences… For instance, the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of African descent, who could be a monkey, and who has a crest that’s difficult to fit into an animal figure.
Another one of his characters, this time fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad researcher (designer) who in some way evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves an important lifetime award, which has not come).
We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte; with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 70s and 80s, he transmits a Central European culture where there was no prissiness about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no shame or problem appearing naked (full-frontal) and with bed scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity among youth. And it’s true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravity than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our bodies; those repressions have created many sexual predators in 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 that was pointed out at the start: he had the opportunity to design and really execute, as he designed the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—don’t ask me why, they’re personal reasons—that I’d 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 residential buildings.
Swarte is more than just a cartoonist; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and billboards (which today are genuine collectibles), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary illustrator to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.