Damien de Medeiros (aka Hermentaire) is a French artist living and working between Paris and Paros. Hermentaire expresses his creativity in various art forms and disciplines. He began making a name for himself in Paris as a music composer creating original soundtracks for documentary films. Composing music within the film industry was a spring board into film making and photography. Each artistic practice is closely linked to each other and anchored in Hermentaire’s insatiable interest in acute observation of characters and story telling. Throughout his life, Hermentaire has been drawing and painting and he has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary with all work signed under the name Hermentaire. This is Hermentaire's third middle name, and a reference to the Saint who killed the dragon of his home town in the South of France.

Art by Hermentaire is constantly evolving in format, technique and form. The transparency and free flowing brushwork in his watercolours on paper, have assisted his series of the ethereal, zoomorphic colourful portraits. These characters have unconsciously gradually synthesised into characters with African tribal features, paying tribute to Hermentaire’s part African heritage. They belong to an imaginary tribe - 'Djambo O’cibilé’; the name of their tribal anthem which is a body of music also composed by Hermentaire. The water colour portraits are monochromatic; mostly black, brown, blue or gold, expressing Hermentaire’s ability to create relaxed yet intriguing personality simply using colour and form. The Djambo characters are not isolated characters based on their visual expression only, they are part of Hermentaire's narrative.

"Djambos are a shy somewhat reclusive tribe, a little suspicious, as until now, they lived quietly in the heart of a natural landscape untouched by the modern world". Hermentaire’s interest in this surreal world led him and his wife Alexandra Leroux, to co-direct & produce the short film Cosmos Melancolia. In 2023 Cosmos Melancholia won numerous awards in several international film festivals. Otomys is releasing your first series of small drawings on linen paper. Previously we have shown your large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas. How did this change in scale and medium come about?

Given my interest in a range of art disciplines, I enjoy working across large and small scale across mediums. Alternating mediums and scale is valuable, it shifts my sense of format, technique and composition. The small, faded pencil drawings on linen paper have an intimate and delicate feel and this invites the viewer to step in closer - there is a connection between art and viewer which is slightly more intense than that of my large-scale acrylic paintings.

In these small pencil drawings, I work to enhance the material aspect of the medium to allow the naivety and relaxation of coloured pencil drawings to be felt – they are tidy but not meticulous. The simple shapes and forms lean into each other playfully; they have a conversation between them, and no single shape is focused on, the pressure on the pencils is even throughout so that the viewer engages with the composition as a whole dream like story. In this series I have included works with accidental brighter pastel markings, nothing is too controlled and it is often the unexpected random markings which bring joy and fun to the work.