Joost Swarte - Eindelijk vrijheid - Silkscreen - 70x50 ** HANDSIGNED+COA **

Silkscreen print by Joost Swarte (*). 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. The shipment will be tracked with a追踪 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 Holland’s most famous comic artists. He studied at the Eindhoven Design Academy and began publishing in his own magazine Modern Papier. He has not limited himself to comics, having proven himself a successful designer, architect and stained-glass artist, always recognizable by his clear line style. As co-owner of Oog & Blik publishing, he is responsible for the design of many Dutch award-winning books. He was one of the founders of the Haarlem International Festival of Comic Strip, and has stood as a defender of comics within the art world. Undoubtedly Joost Swarte is one of those emblematic comic artists of contemporary comics; his style, while reminiscent of Hergé and his creations, makes sense because nothing is better for guaranteeing the success of characters and stories than appearing attractive with pre-existing models. In this sense, Swarte, who still lives today, was born in 1947 and is not contemporaneous with Hergé; his creations emerged with a gap of a couple of decades, with Tintin already a fully consolidated product. Swarte creates some of his characters with a certain resemblance to Hergé's aesthetics, 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 by imagination, to latitudes they would hardly visit in reality. The distinctive strength of this brilliant Dutch artist, which he especially imparts to his drawings, is that his academic background is industrial design, and this makes the characters in his panels stand out more against the backgrounds, furniture, and landscapes that compose them. He does not draw to build a story; his drawings are the story itself, his characters are more credible, fictitiously speaking, because his panels have great expressive richness. That academic background is an investment with which Swarte blesses us with the 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 sophisticatedly render it—a drawn catalog of furniture store products, tools, machines, cars, buildings, and even fashion. When he has the chance to draw mechanisms, they come to life, as if he were sketching or prototyping something that could become a reality, something that, following his instructions, could be made to work. I don’t know what mechanical knowledge Swarte might have, but I’m sure his designs didn’t stay in a mere daydream. And then there are his characters; let us start from the fact that reading his comics is somewhat erratic, surreal, perhaps eccentric, but certain characters are as surreal as anthropomorphized animals, two-legged dogs dressed as humans, or animals that simply speak and reason perfectly like you and me. No surprise that some of his most famous characters are difficult to define; take Jopo de Pojo, a young mischief-maker with no malice who gets into trouble without really intending to, all the product of puns, mistakes, misunderstandings, and coincidences… The iconic Jopo de Pojo is a boy who could be of black race, who could be a monkey, and who has a crest that’s hard to fit into an animal figure. Another of his characters, this time fully human, is Anton Makassar, a kind of mad researcher (designer) who in some ways evokes Professor Bacterio (Mortadelo y Filemón) from our renowned and insufficiently recognized Ibáñez (he deserves a major lifetime award that he hasn’t received). There is also an interesting transgressive element in Swarte, with the bulk of his creation and his maturity in the 1970s and 1980s, as a transmitter of Central European culture where there was no hesitation about sex or pornography; in this sense, his characters have no scruples or problems appearing nude (in the buff) and in bedroom scenes, without this being understood as an incitement to promiscuity toward the youth audience. 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 are what have created many sexual predators throughout recent history. One aspect that stands out in Joost Swarte’s biography is a dimension that goes beyond the cartoonist and aligns with what I mentioned at the outset; he had the opportunity to design and execute truly because he designed the Toneelschuur theatre in Haarlem. Haarlem, Netherlands, is one of those cities—don’t ask me why, personal reasons—that I would love 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 cover a bit of everything: stained glass, murals, posters and placards (which today are genuine collectibles), playing cards, rugs, wrapping paper… Undoubtedly a designer necessary for conceiving the evolution of contemporary comics.

Schätzpreis:€150

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