О Борисе Лекаре

With light, watercolor 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… In the series of the Kiev watercolors 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 only coming very close you could discern the objects of the landscape. And the remarkable thing is: when looking closely you were impressed by their colorfulness because though the brightness of colors was reduced, their correlation was preserved.

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.

— Мирон Петровский, Киев

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.

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.

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… These pictures are to be seen and listened to – not to the sound, but to the silence.

— Григорий Островский, Иерусалим

Since Israeli weather prevents artists from painting in watercolors outside for a long time, Lekar has no other choice as to draw brief sketches and after that to paint large pictures at home, from memory. His pictures wash away the time and melt away in recollections; they blend local landscapes and other landscapes, from the past, born by his mind’s eye and in the process of his work… These pictures astonish, since they display neither this world, nor that world.

— Йонатан Амир, Иерусалим