Born in 1972, Damien de Medeiros aka Hermentaire is a French artist living and working in Paris (France) and Paros (Greece).
Damien is a multi-disciplinary artist who expresses his creativity in various art forms and disciplines. First a music composer, he started by making a name for himself by composing original soundtracks for documentary films. He, then becomes a film maker, a photographer and more recently a decorator. Each artistic practice nourishes and complements each other. While doing all these artistic activities, Damien has always painted and drawn. He has developed this particular visual vocabulary overtime and signs his pictorial work under the name Hermentaire, his third middle name, a reference to the Saint who killed the dragon of his home town in southern France.
His work is constantly evolving whether it’s the format or the form. For some time now, in addition to acrylic on canvas, he has nourished his work by painting watercolours on paper. His interest in this technique started as he enjoyed the possibilities of transparency watercolours allow. He first created zoomorphic colourful characters which have unconsciously evolved towards characters with more African inspirations, a tribute to one of Damiens' heritage. He has created the members of an imaginary tribe, he baptised «Djambo O’cibilé» (in reference to the title of a song he wrote and composed and which of course is their anthem). They appear in monochrome, mostly black, brown, sometimes blue or gold. Recently Hermentaire has created more colourful and diverse portraits but regardless of the colour, they all share a strong personality.
While creating these characters, sometimes represented as a couple, sometimes alone, he began to stage them in their environment. His characters appear now in several spaces and landscapes. Djambos are a shy, somewhat a hidden tribe, a little suspicious, as until now, they lived quietly in their natural element in the heart of nature which is today disrupted, threatened by the violence of the modern world. Therefore, there will always be an eye somewhere in his work and Hermentaire plays around this sometimes in a figurative way, sometimes in more abstract composition.
Damien’s constant creativity has led him to co-direct & co-produce with his wife Alexandra Leroux their short film Cosmos Melancolia for which he has also composed the music. The film has already won numerous awards in several international film festivals in 2023.