Totems loom over the crowds of Armory Week, nine feet tall and luminously prismatic. This is Pier 36, between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, where the Art on Paper Fair hosts galleries from across the world every March. Each booth displays works ranging from historical prints to modern and contemporary constructions, all dedicated to the humble material: made from it, sold for it.

One of this year’s stars was the late Roland Poska, an inventive papermaker and printmaker who elevated each practice to the status of painting and sculpture. The freestanding pillars are his. Titled Sentinels, they watch over visitors passing through the fair’s central corridor, inviting a closer look at their nuanced textures. Vividly colored, packed with geometric and organic forms, their fiber surfaces record an imaginative yet rigid labor.

Poska’s Lithuanian parents were bakers. After the family business closed, he acquired equipment meant for mixing dough and expanded his papermaking capacity. His process—equal parts sheet pan technique, erasure, and reapplication—organizes shapes and layers. The paper pulp is rolled, torn, formed, peeled away, and hand-sliced: a culinary range of methods that reenvision familiar material. What a nod to glutinous pastry dough, folded many times over, expanding and splitting in a hot oven. As Poska wrote, “We meet, we grow, we part.”

Although not quite 3D, Poska’s wall art protrudes well beyond a flat surface. His untitled triptych is muscular, made of pigmented mash kneaded and configured into pastoral compositions that hold together while simultaneously dividing space. They whip expressionist aggression into modulations as delicate as opalescent glass. Poska described these works as “papestry”—paper tapestry—but they also evoke stained glass like John La Farge’s Peonies Blown in the Wind (ca. 1880) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The work reminds us of crisp Lithuanian šimtalapis, cut in two: deckled edges, spirals of flaky dough undulating from thin to thick, flecks of color from raisins, filled with poppy seeds or custard, a definitive focal point. All are tactile experiences with heritage baked in.

3/28/2019