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

Joost Swarte serigraphy (*).
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, Haarlem.
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 registered with 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 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 also proven himself as a successful designer, architect, and stained-glass designer, always recognizable by his clear line. As co-owner of Oog & Blik Publishing, he designed many acclaimed Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Week, and has established himself as a defender of comics within 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 better to guarantee character and comic success than looking attractive with preexisting models. In this sense, Swarte, who is still alive today, was born in 1947 and is not a contemporary of Hergé; his creations emerged with a gap of a couple of decades, Tintin already being a fully consolidated product.

Swarte creates some of his characters with certain similarities, aesthetically, to what Hergé offered, and some of them are given an adventure story, perhaps less sophisticated than Tintin, but that did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th-century cartoonists, to transport children, even if only in imagination, to places they would hardly visit in reality.

The distinguishing characteristic of this brilliant Dutch artist, which his drawings reflect in particular, is that his formal training is industrial design, which makes the characters 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 more credible, fictively speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.

That academic background is an investment with which Swarte treats us to a visual feast; it is as if he sometimes returns to being a designer, and when he has to draw a machine, it is not a simple object—quite the opposite: he tries to sophisticated it. It is a colorfully drawn catalog of the products of a furniture store, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion.

When he has the opportunity to draw them, his mechanisms come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become real, something that, following his instructions, could be brought to life. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but surely his designs don’t stay as mere fantasies.

And then there are his characters; let us start from the premise that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as anthropomorphic animals, dogs on two legs dressed as humans, or animals who 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 trickster, without malice, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of wordplay, mishearings, oversights, coincidences… For the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be black, could be a monkey, and has a crest that is hard to fit into an animal figure.

Another of his characters, this one entirely human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of crazy researcher (designer) who evokes, in some way, Profesor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime prize, and it hasn’t arrived).

We also have an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, conveying a Central European culture where there were no puritanical notions about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no scruples or problem appearing nude (full-frontal) and with bedroom scenes, without this being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward youth. And indeed, nothing is worse for sexual perversions than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; those repressions have created many sexual predators throughout recent history.

One aspect of Joost Swarte stands out in any biography you read about him, a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and that was hinted at from the start: he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, since he designed the Toneelschuur theater 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 may not. 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 just a comics artist; his designs span a bit of everything—stained glass, murals, posters and signs (today authentic collectibles), playing cards, rugs, gift wrap… Undoubtedly a necessary artist for shaping the evolution of contemporary comics.