Camille Walala found herself searching for a particular shade of yellow when beginning work on the façade of the Montana factory in a sleepy town in Denmark’s southern Funen. She was on the lookout for something brighter, bolder. But, this project was a unique one for the London-based French artist who is known for her colourful urban interventions. This time, her palette was decided before her work even began.
Family-owned brand Montana, after all, is a company itself synonymous with colour. The company’s storage system, designed 40 years ago by Peter J Lassen, is available in an imagination-boosting 42 colours. These shades, custom-mixed back in 2019 by award-winning Danish colour expert Margrethe Odgaard, were the paintbox handed to Walala when she was asked to begin work on her transformative artwork – a celebration of Montana’s 40th anniversary year.
The one yellow in the mix may have been a little pale and buttery for Walala’s tastes (her Memphis-style interventions from the SALT hotel of Palmar to a whole street in east London’s Leyton, near where her partner Julia Jomaa grew up, and installations for London Design Festival usually tend towards a punchier palette) but the artist grasped the opportunity to work with slightly different hues.
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The finished project may be a little more muted in places, but is no less fun and fantastical than Walala’s previous work. The artist’s mantra to ‘take joy seriously’ is in fact nicely aligned with Odgaard’s, who vows to ‘take colour seriously’. Both tie in nicely with Montana’s new tagline: ‘Let’s create playful spaces’.
‘We want to encourage the world to use more colours,’ says Montana CEO Joakim Lassen, son of the late founder, ‘but we can’t do that without walking the talk ourselves. We needed to transform our rather dull looking factory into a colourful statement – as playful as the furniture we make there.’ His father, he adds, was himself fond of shocking people and would surely be happy with Walala’s aim: ‘I wanted people to drive by and be, like, “What the hell?!”’
Indeed, the pattern on the factory’s walls, which for Walala brings to mind the cinematic world of Tim Burton, also cleverly references the shapes of Montana’s famous storage pieces. It’s an installation that will be instantly recognisable to fans of Walala’s work, but the use of Odgaard’s colours gives this project a slightly different feel to that of the artist’s previous creations. For the artist, it was an exercise in getting out of her comfort zone. The results, we’re sure you would agree, were worth the discomfort. montanafurniture.com; camillewalala.com
