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BORIS LEKAR
Born In 1932 in
Kharkiv, Ukraine, In 1950-56 he studied pictorial art and architecture.
Between 1959 and 1989 he lived in Kiev, worked in the field of pictorial,
monumental, plastic arts and architecture. Since 1990 he has lived in
Jerusalem (Israel). His pictorial works are exhibited in many private
collections in various countries, including Ukraine, the United States,
France and Japan as well as the collection of the Museum of Israel. Boris
Lekar is a laureate of the Mordecai Narkis prize (1996) and the prize of
the Israeli Absorbtion Ministry (1998).
Main exhibitions held in recent years:
1991 — personal exhibition in the House of Zionist
Confederation in Jerusalem and exhibition in the Tova
Ossman Gallery in Tel Aviv;
1992 — personal exhibitions in the Jerusalem Artist's
House and the «Nora» Gallery in Jerusalem;
1993 — personal exhibition in the Jerusalem Theater;
1994 — personal exhibition «lsraeli Views» in the
Architect's House in Kiev, a personal exhibition in the muse
um of the Artists' Village in Ein-Charod; participation in the
exhibitions «Artist Inviting Artist» in the Jerusalem Artist's
House and «Nisayon» in the Kiev Artist's House;
1995 — exhibitions «New Art from Israeli Galleries» and
«Art Expo» in New York, a personal exhibition in the kibbutz
Ein-Gedi;
1996 — exhibitions "Landscape - Before and Now», the
State Museum, Nikozia (Cyprus) and «StiII Life», the gallery
of the Village of Artists, Jerusalem;
1997 — personal exhibition in the gallery «Binyaney ha-
Uma»» Jerusalem, a personal exhibition in the Jerusalem
Artist's House;
1998 — personal exhibition in Beit-Gabriel, Kinnereth,
personal exibition in the Museum of Rami and Uri, Ashdod-
Jaeob, Israel;
1999 — exibition «100 years of the israeSy water-colon),
Museum of Israel, Jerusalem.
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M.
PETROVSKY. PREFACE
M. PETROVSKY. PREFACE
For artist Boris Lekar the whole world, while preserving its integrity, is
clearly divided into material objects and spirituality, which is contained
in them and emanated by them. His attitude to materiality is skeptical,
while he is in love with spirituality. His pictures reflect matter's
destructive conversion into a spiritual power. We witness some strange
artistic spiritualism: spiritual essence, which, in the artist's opinion,
is contained in all things, is breaking through the material shell.
With light, water-color strokes, with the persistence of a Barbizon School
student, he constantly engraved Kiev landscapes seen outside his house,
sunsets and sunrises, seasons, instant changes of light. And water in
which he dipped his brushes, mixing with the water of the painted Dnieper
or rain, washed out the momentary objectiveness, revealing some eternal
meanings in it. In the series of the Kiev water-colors he has reduced
color to an unbelievable degree, so that ten steps away it seemed like the
papers are blank, five steps away - that there is something, and onl y
coming very close you could discern the objects of the landscape. And the
remarkable thing is: when looking closely, you were impressed by their
colorfullness because though the brightness of colors was reduced, their
correlation was preserved. Thus, one and the same music tune can be played
in different octaves, and moving further and further to the left or to the
right, go beyond the limits of the keyboard and even beyond the limits of
the human hearing. But there, beyond these limits, in the zone of
non-hearing, the correlation of notes (at least theoretically) will remain
the same. Taking the image onto the verge (almost beyond the verge) of
human sight, beyond the limits of its keyboard, Boris Lekar challenges
materiality for the sake of its own spirituality.
In fact, Boris Lekar resolves the problem which is unsolvable for an
artist, at least for an artist remaining within the limits of the mimetic
art - to picture the world of pure spirituality. Because the artist of
this choice perceives the world only as a visible one, i.e. that of
objects, things, matter. However, Boris Lekar insists that he, like
Meterlink (remember the «Blue Bird»?) takes out to the scene of his canvas
not bread, but rather the «soul of bread», not sugar but rather the «soul
of sugar», not water but rather the «soul of water». His «lsraeli Views»
are, of course, the soul of Israel. Everyone who has ever been to that
country will testify to the correspondence of Boris Lekar's views to
nature - both in specific details and, first and foremost, in the
penetrating blue and yellow colors, which Andrei Bely (for another
occasion) has described as «gold in sky-blue». Unsolvable problems remain
unsolvable, but in solving them, the master makes artistic discoveries.
The same was true in the Kiev works of Boris Lekar, for instance, in his
series of portraits. The spiritual aureole of the persons portrayed is
expressive on its own - of Mozart or Janus Korczak - but in their
portraits you see an aureole rather than a figure, along with apparent
similarity and characteristic features.
As in a picture made not in light-waves but rather in heatwaves, the
hottest surfaces dominate; in Boris Lekar's portraits, faces are reflected
in the heat-waves of shining spirituality, overcoming their own
materiality.
We could interpret this constant struggle with spirituality as appealing
to a so-called national mentality. The Jewish religious tradition, for
several thousand years, has barred pictures of a certain kind: thou shalt
not make thee any graven image. Having broken into the emancipated fine
arts, Jewish artists (especially those of the turn of the century) began
to picture the world using various kinds of destructions, as if trying to
avoid the bar but at the same time sensing its pressure. But here is the
problem: has this well-known Jewish mentality been shaped as a result of
this ancient ban, or was the ban itself born of this Jewish mentality? The
answer is probably known to God alone, but, in reconstructing the visible
world Boris Lekar is simultaneously «making» and «not making» a graven
image.
The strange dualism of Boris Lekar's material and spiritual substances may
be also explained through his social circumstances, the specific
circumstances of Soviet life, which surrounded the artist before his
departure.
The material image of this world was too real, its pressure on the artist
was too rough, the artist's spirit was chased too deep into the
underground. In protecting it, he made his spiritual essence dominant in
his artistic world, and attributed to it the extrinsic status of
visibility. This may have been the «internal» dissidence of Boris Lekar.
Artists of his generation manifested their social opposition and personal
stance in different ways. He did it this way.
When Kievites of the past beheld in their our city another City and called
their Kiev - «Jerusalem», they also revealed the spiritu-al in the
material.
Miron Petrovsky (Kiev)
G. OSTROVSKY. PREFACE
Boris Lekar is an extraordinary person in the creative world. A recent
architect in Kiev, even here in Israel he found ways to exercise his
abilities and knowledge in searching for and academic study of ancient
Jewish architectonics, and with this purpose in mind he visited Germany,
Turkey, India and other countries. His services have been well rewarded.
But Lekar's significance as an artist is no less important. His personal
exhibitions took place in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, othe cities of the country,
and lately some of his works supplemented the modern art collection of the
Museum of Israel (which is extremely unusual if not an exception among
newly repatriated artists). Lekar is not an artist of an experiential
school of thought («l sing of what I see»), but rather of a philosophical
one, fastening his eyes on the depths of the entity, which are hidden from
the eyes of a superficial and indifferent spectator; open not so much and
not only to the sensual tangible images of this world, but rather to the
emanations of the superior forces, invisible to the eyes. His pictures
cause one to think not of everyday life, but rather of the being, of the
concentrated meditation far from the worldly bustling;
 yet,
at the same time, this is not abstract mysticism, but rather visual
images, embodied in color and form of the fine arts. These works have to
be seen, while any copy gives only far away and rough impressions. You
will never pass quickly by them as a vacuous spectator, you have to stand
before them, peer deliberately, and then your work of mind and feelings
will be rewarded.
In his pictures from the «lsraeli Antiquities* cycle, architectural
monuments appear as if from the depth of the infinite and very rich space,
perceived through a graphic metaphor of the historical space . The
artist's eyes penetrate through the thick veil of ancient times, drawing
out of almost cosmic distance objective evidence of the life of our
ancestors of the biblical epochs. Lekar, if I may say so, actualizes
archeology, links museum antiquities with the modern mind, making us sense
consanguinity with this land, with the history and culture of its people.
The same task has been set before the water-color series, and it is
carried out in very peculiar, almost monochrome, landscapes of Israel,
painted in one tonality. Fata morgana, mirages and visions appear in the
sand vagueness, in whose hardly discernible profiles a careful viewer will
recognize the walls and towers of the ancient Jerusalem, the waters of the
Kinnereth and the Dead Sea, the hills of Zfat, the Negev desert...
One unique characteristic of Lekar's works of art is light. Not the light
which illuminates an object or a picture from the outside, but the light
emanating from the picture itself, coming from its unapproachable depths.
Is it mysterious light of gone-out stars, spiritual light of the people,
once buried in the sand, dispersed and then risen back to life? There can
be many hypotheses and interpretations; I would guess that even the artist
has no exhaustive answer to all the questions. Arts are arts rather than
exact sciences because they appear in an inseparable composition of
knowledge, feelings, and intuition, conscious and subconscious; if we try
and separate them in an analysis, we run a risk of destroying that which
turns a canvas or a sheet of paper with colors on it into a masterpiece of
fine art.
The artist's palette is recherche lapidary, color characteristics are
hidden in hardly discernible tinctures. These are not «sights», but a
«landscape of soul», not pictures of the land, but mirages shaping on the
verge between the real and the unreal realms. Lekar's landscapes are a
kingdom of silence and loneliness: a man stays one on one with the
original greatness of nature and neither rustling leaves, nor a flying
bird, nor a running animal breaks the eternal original silence. These
pictures are to be seen and listened to - not to the sound, but to the
silence penetrated by an untouchable thought and feeling of the artist,
his reverence before the perfection of the being. Sometimes it seems like
this is the nature of the first days of creation, and only in a few
compositions do silhouettes of a house on a rock or a yacht in a bay bring
us back to today.
Pictures and words cannot be equivalent to each other, even less so when
the essence of the picture is not in the materiality of its object, but
rather in the intangibility of its mood. Descriptions leave room for a
miracle of transfiguration of form and color into pure spirituality. Boris
Lekar's works are of this kind.
Grigory Ostrovsky (Jerusalem)
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