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

Serigraphy by Joost Swarte (*).
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 stored in a professional art folder, therefore offered in perfect condition).
Provenance: Private collection.

The artwork will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. Shipping will be certified 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 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 House he has been responsible for the design of many award-winning Dutch books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Comics Day, and has stood as a defender of comics in the art world.
Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic comic artists of contemporary comics; his style, though seemingly similar to Hergé and his creations, makes sense because nothing better to ensure the success of characters and comics than appearing appealing 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, with Tintin already a fully established 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 that did allow, as a veiled objective of many 20th‑century comic artists, to transport children, even if only with their imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality.
The distinctive value of this brilliant Dutch draughtsman, which he imparts particularly to his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, and that makes the composition of his panels give more prominence to the characters, by the background, furnishings, and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to build a story; rather his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictitiously speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness.
That academic training is an investment with which Swarte gifts us the sight; it is as if he occasionally returns to being a designer, and when he has to draw a machine it is not a simple object but the opposite—an attempt to sophisticate it; it’s 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 mechanisms, they come to life, as if he were drafting the sketch or prototype of something that can become real, something that, following his instructions, could be put into operation. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte may have, but surely his designs did not stay in a mere daydream.
And then there are his characters; let’s start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but that is because certain characters are as surreal as they are anthropomorphized animals, two‑legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that, simply put, speak and reason perfectly like you and me.
It is not surprising that some of his most famous characters are difficult to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young prankster, harmless, who gets into trouble without really wanting to, all the result of double meanings, misunderstandings, slips, coincidences… For example, the iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be Black, who could be a monkey, and who has a crest that is hard to fit into an animal figure.
Another of his characters, entirely human this time, is Anton Makassar, a kind of eccentric investigator (designer) who evokes in certain ways Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and not sufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award, and he hasn’t received it).
There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and its maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, as a transmitter of a Central European culture where there was no shortage of frankness about sex and pornography; in this sense, his characters have no modesty or problem with appearing naked (fully) and with bed scenes, without that being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. And it is true, because nothing is worse for sexual depravities than wanting to see something pernicious in something as natural as our body; these repressions are what have created many sexual predators throughout 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 illustrator and that I mentioned at the beginning; he had the opportunity to design and truly execute, since he designed the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities, don’t ask me why—personal reasons—that I would like to visit someday and 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 banners (today they are genuine collectible objects), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a necessary artist to conceive the evolution of contemporary comics.