Chet Zar has never been shy about the size of his imagination, but this time he’s putting a number on it. The painter, sculptor and former Hollywood monster-maker has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund what he’s calling, without much room for argument, his biggest painting ever: a monumental take on the centuries-old horror subject Temptation of St. Anthony, destined to anchor his October solo show at Copro Gallery.
The campaign, titled Chet Zar’s Biggest Painting Ever! Temptation of St. Anthony, went live September 1 and is being run in partnership with Copro Gallery director Gary Pressman. As of press time the project sits at roughly 29 percent funded with a little under three weeks left on the clock, and Zar is asking backers to help underwrite the sheer scale of the undertaking: more canvas, more paint and more hours than anything he’s previously attempted for a single piece.
The subject of Saint Anthony’s desert torment by demons has haunted painters for half a millennium, from Martin Schongauer’s engraving to Hieronymus Bosch’s phantasmagoric panels to Salvador Dalí’s surrealist reimagining, and it’s easy to see why the theme appeals to an artist like Zar, whose entire career has been an exercise in giving grotesque, uncanny things a pulse. Best known in genre circles for his creature and makeup effects work on films like Planet of the Apes and the Hellboy franchise, as well as his visual collaborations with the band Tool, Zar has spent the past two decades building a parallel life as one of dark surrealism’s most recognizable painters, his oil-slick monsters caught somewhere between decay and tenderness.
This isn’t Zar’s first rodeo with crowdfunding, either. His 2013 Kickstarter for the funeral-themed exhibition Ego Death pulled in over $70,000 from more than 400 backers, and 2016’s DY5TOPIA saw fans fund a full physical transformation of Copro Gallery into the artist’s post-apocalyptic universe, complete with live performers and prop-built streetscapes. Given that track record, backers are being encouraged to treat this campaign less like a donation and more like an advance ticket into whatever hallucinatory funeral-parlor-meets-vernissage event Zar and Pressman cook up for the unveiling.
Copro Gallery, housed in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Arts Complex, has long served as ground zero for Zar’s biggest swings, and it seems fitting that his most ambitious canvas to date will make its debut on that same familiar turf. Whether Zar’s demons prove any easier to resist than St. Anthony’s remains to be seen, but the countdown to October is officially on.
Chet Zar’s Biggest Painting Ever! Temptation of St. Anthony is live now through Kickstarter.
