French illustrator Philippe Weisbecker spent forty years in New York honing a hand of exquisitely sophisticated naïveté in editorial concept pieces for Time and New Yorker magazines. Since retired to Paris, he now works on his own thing, thing being the operative word as he is obsessed by the spare beauty and innate poetry of utilitarian objects. “When I go to a new town, I don’t go to the art museum; I go to the hardware store,” he has been quoted as saying. His first solo show in a New York gallery of his drawings, the inaugural project of recently merged ZieherSmith & Horton, includes schematically flattened or prospectively skewed renderings of furniture, cars, trailers, machine parts, bird cages, gravestones, architectural elevations (of anonymous, ubiquitous American main street buildings) and what the artist calls his “structures elementaire” of engineered iron lattice forms, often drawn on gorgeous found historic ledgers and commercial paper stock. His style fuses the typological structuralism of minimal and conceptual art with a vaguely Outsider sensibility, in terms of materials, neatness, handwriting and indeed obsessive serial repetition. Think Hilla and Bernd Becher teaming up with James Castle. DAVID COHEN
Philippe Weisbecker, Ecodeco Vanessa, 2007. Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 11-3/4 x 15 inches. Courtesy of Zieher Smith & Horton
On view through October 4 at 516 West 20th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 229 1088
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