A farewell exhibition for Basilios Poulos

‘A Moment in Time’
A farewell exhibition for Basilios Poulos

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

In his 33 years at Rice as a professor of visual arts, Basilios Poulos has experienced many career highlights, celebrated in the exhibition “A Moment in Time” on display at Rice Media Center until Feb. 15.

Poulos has traveled around the country and the world to exhibit his work — San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy and Greece. He has had more than 40 one-person shows. He has earned fellowships, residencies and awards and maintains two studios, in Houston and in his ancestral Greek village in the mountains of the Peloponnese in southern Greece.

	In his 33 years at Rice as a professor of visual arts, Basilios Poulos has experienced many career highlights, celebrated in his exhibition, “A Moment in Time,” at Rice Media Center until Feb. 15. JEFF FITLOW

But what Poulos holds dearest are the highlights he has had as a teacher. Poulos is particularly fond of the nine summers he spent taking students abroad to learn watercolor in Greece.

“It was always an adventure,” Poulos said. “Because I wasn’t just their teacher, I was their tour guide, their translator, their caregiver and their friend. And to see young artists open up, explore and grow — well, there’s just nothing better.”

Poulos has been an influential person in the development of many art students at Rice, using his own projects as a way to get students involved. He would explore the concepts he was teaching through the art he was creating. His students would participate — asking questions, offering suggestions and making their own pieces.

“We always had a dialogue going,” Poulos said of his students. “I might have been the teacher, but I got a lot from them. It was like being a scientist in a lab — like we were doing experiments together until we found what worked.”

Poulos said that the mark of good art is beyond something that “works.” Rather, it’s something that provides “a constant sense of discovery.” He tries to make art that people can look at again and find a new meaning.

“A painting should have a life beyond the painter,” Poulos said. “I love it when someone says, ‘I’ve had your painting for 10 years and I saw something new in it today.’ It means that I have succeeded in creating something provocative. Something that someone can connect to.”

Though Poulos has worked in different media, his preferred method is to begin by drawing in charcoal on canvas and paper.  Much of his work could be classified as abstraction or figuration, but Poulos said he is an abstractionist that injects figures into his paintings.

Poulos uses “A Moment in Time” to tell the story of the path he made as an artist from abstraction, to figuration, to a combination of the two.

“The paintings in the exhibition represent a journey taken of my formative years in abstraction to the current work in figuration,” Poulos said.  “They offer my examination into the fragmentation of memory and desire — or places seen and unseen — with consideration of form and flesh. All the work is rooted in modernism, abstraction and figuration.”

The selection of images represents only a fraction of his complete body of work and provides a mini-retrospective of his career at Rice.

Though his time at Rice is ending in a teaching capacity, Poulos said he would not be far from campus. He said he might even continue to serve as an associate at Martel College, though when he first came to Rice he served as an associate at Brown College.

“I still have Rice in my heart,” he said.

Poulos said that this “farewell show” doesn’t really mean retirement for him.

“I’m not going to miss my job, because my job is in the studio,” Poulos said. “And I will still be in my studio painting, learning and creating. And my students — well, a lot of them have become friends — so I expect to keep in touch. That’s the beauty of being a professor.”

“A Moment in Time” is free and open to the public 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday until Feb. 15 in the Visual and Dramatic Arts Main Exhibition Gallery at Rice’s Media Center. The exhibition is underwritten by the Jerome J. Segal Endowment.