Gérard Cairaschi, multimedia artist, video artist, photographer and creator of installations, lives and works in Paris. His work has been shown and won prizes in numerous exhibitions and video festivals around the world. His work questions the image’s cultural dimensions, its codes, its means of representation and its historical status and reference. He shows joyous or solemn images of nature or people, which refer to the history of art, to myth, to religion, to literature, to cinema, to a shared history and to that of the individual. Over the last four years, he has become the French video artist most often selected by international video festivals.

Gérard Cairaschi work is an ongoing exploration of the different ways and means of representation possible through video and photography - techniques which the artist brings together, often with graphics, to make a video montage - a fusion of colour, sound and imagery.

Montage, a technique pioneered in film by Sergei Eisenstein at the beginning of the twentieth century, is now part of our everyday modern world - it is there in nearly every TV commercial and music video. In the language of film ’montage’ is the uniting of shots of seemingly unrelated objects in the same film sequence so that they take on a new relationship to, each other, rather than being dependent on a narrative sequence to give it meaning. This collision of elements, of unrelated shots leaves the spectator to create a new concept in his or her mind realising the conflict between the elements. The works of Gérard Cairaschi, often take theform of multi-screen installations with different or related images juxtaposed to make a whole, or as a combination of images to construct ’visual traps’ which question our vision and how we relate to the image: "The viewer is trapped in a visual impossibility, between an illusionary visual of the filmed space (logical perspective) and another kind of representation, an in-between representation".

Cairaschi’s work is informed by both cultural and historical references. Images of nature and the human form refer back to the history of art, cinema and literature; communal stories and myths are interwoven with the story of the individual. Sound and silence are used to promote this feeling of association and alter the pace and momentum of the video.

The first in the series of three videos presented at the Gallery at sketch, Mémoire(s) 1999, 17’15" combines images of nature with references to the human form in various repeating motifs - a landscape seeped in supernatural hues of blue and orange, the silhouette of a mother holding a small child, the leafy branches of a tree against a sky, heads of flowers, a still hand, a single leaf, a closed eye, a flowing stream. Intersecting visual layers of imagery pulsate - at times frenetic split-second changes appear to take on new form, one metamorphosing into the other, displacing our sense of reality and creating new meaning informed by our own association between what is seen and what is evoked. The artist describes it as "an interlacing of images and a luminous vibration that invades us".

Oversight 2001, 12’16" recalls the more delicate imagery and muted tones of Japanese printmaking, especially the ’floating world’ of Ukiyo-e, an art form that was developed in Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries. As Cairaschi describes it: "Oversight is a poetic journey inside the pictorial technique of prints. Without citing actuai works, the pictures evoke their motifs and themes. A representative ensemble in which lines, colours and signs immerse us in the very material of images of a floating world". Caraischi creates literally, a floating, dreamlike world of smoky grey rivers and sepia skies with the central motif of the carp, images of leaves and grasses intersect to create a sketchy animation.

Délices (Delight) 2002, returns to the more vibrant world of Mémoire(s) but here sound, a strong element of all of these works, is used to most elegiac effect in the form of a song which appears to have a direct relationship with the image of the sleeping child, the central motif of the piece.

Gérard Cairaschi was born in 1958 in the South of France and now lives and works in Paris. An artist and photographer, he has been making film and video installations since 1974 and has exhibited extensively around the world, in exhibitions and at film festivals that include Tokyo, Moscow, Sâo Paulo and Montreal. In 1999 he received the prize for Video ait SCAM (Societé civile des auteurs multimedia) for the video Mémoire(s) and in 2000 was awarded the special jury prize from Videolisboa (International Video Festival, Lisbon 2000).

Cairaschi’s videos are part of the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the European Centre for Photography and the Harvard University film archives. He has, since 1981, taught at L’École Régionale des Beaux-Arts then at L’École Superieure d’Art et de Design de Reims where he has led courses in experimental video, film and sound.