Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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Over 180 collectors have purchased works by Gianfranco Zenerato on Catawiki.
The top 5 rising artists on Catawiki.

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193 items sold - 100% positive - 71 reviews

www.zenerato.com

Active since 1990, with over 600 participations in national and international art events.
Recognized for high-quality works, with over 500 awards received.
Present in public and private collections in Italy, Europe, America, and Asia.
He has exhibited alongside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc.
Reviewed by the main Italian critics.

International Storage Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - File Containing the Artist's Professional History
Unique piece painted by hand - overall dimensions including frame 34x34x3.5cm - acrylic, metallic pigments, and luminescent varnishes - 2025
Ready to hang - Stunning baroque wooden frame of high quality, handcrafted.

"ICON" is a visual reflection on the sacredness of technology. The everyday object, a mouse, is sublimated into a relic of digital thought, at the center of a chromatic energy that vibrates like an aura. The pictorial matter becomes the language of the informational flow, translating the mechanical gesture into inner perception. The artist transforms functionality into a symbol, restoring to the present a cult image: the icon of our connected time.
Owning ICON means safeguarding a fragment of the most authentic contemporaneity: a work that combines aesthetics, reflection, and technological memory. A piece destined to become a testament to our passage from the analog man.
to the digital man

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR BIDDERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipments to non-EU countries are possible, but due to complex bureaucratic procedures (ministerial authorizations, customs procedures, etc.), additional costs are expected, already included in the shipping costs indicated in the listing.
For the same reasons, delivery times may be longer than usual.
Thank you for your understanding.

Gianfranco Zenerato (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has embarked on an artistic journey that has led him to participate in over 600 art events, receiving National and International recognitions for the quality of his works. With over 500 awards to his name, his creations enrich prominent public and private collections in Italy, Europe, America, and Asia. He has exhibited alongside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc...

Currently, he collaborates with the renowned art critic, Prof. Giammarco Puntelli.

Some of the countless reviews by noted experts in the field of art:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that stream of 1970s artists, strict messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato, on the other hand, is a bearer of a poignant warning, where man's defeat can also represent the antechamber of a secular redemption. It is a vision rich in symbolic meanings, by a modern school painter who, with talent, manages to reconcile research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes from this emblematic image that it offers a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, a flower, and a young woman. The classicism of these silent images breaks the suspended atmosphere of a gray world—the contemporary one—that distracts us from the dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentiality and the harmony of forms testifies to the expressive tension and mastery of a skilled artist. The blend of flowers, fruits, and contemporary technological objects is interesting and unprecedented. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato crafts sign-based narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary, organized according to ordered sequences of his mental processes. His imaginative constructions could, therefore, confuse critical judgment into classifying him as a surrealist. This is not accurate, as he does not present us with an absurd and unreal imaginary, but rather, he depicts a reality familiar to us, with a communicative purpose and highly symbolic.

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well-structured, finely and richly articulated, and presents a reality constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenographic component, and those who explore these messages are left to decipher the meaning their author has attributed to them. He plays with symbols and references and delights in confusing the interpretative coordinates of what could be the plot of a story disguised as unreality. (S. Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato, we have an excellent idea, transformed with great skill into a depiction of waiting, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to reconnect us with feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)


The author emphasizes the overlap and intersection of genres, through an allusive and incisive metaphorical exploration of subjects and colors. With a striking intuition, he unifies the past (still life), the present (the female image), and the future (symbolism, cryptic writing...), so that the work becomes an artistic paradigm as well as a literary and meta-narrative one. The painter aims to identify a new visual universe, explore the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amidst so much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist's creativity then reaffirms — also thanks to the vibrant chromatic tones — that the approach related to genre still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato's painting guides us to a perception of reality operated on three levels. It is a journey through time that we undertake with the artist, who, through various experiments, has come to situate his vision in a present that 'looks' at the past as an ideal but now lost world, and at a future full of artificial and contrived contaminations.
It is a warning and a cautionary message that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas framing the overall view. The 'battery' that we find as a fixed element is telling us 'attention'; time is running out. The strong call of natural elements placed in the foreground, contaminated by objects from the technological world (the mouse, the CD, or the alarm clock), emphasizes how important it is not to sever the connection with the past, a world where nature was predominant.
The female element, located on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of Mother Earth placed in the middle land between the past and the future.
Gianfranco, like Odysseus, travels through this temporal dimension in search of the forces that sustain and shape us, alter us, or govern our fate. Driven towards the future, the artist-man confronts the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility in the face of the complexity of a world he has created—the technological one—that is slipping out of his grasp. He thus feels the need to return to where he started. This cyclical nature reemerges, where the journey is this eternal call between life and death. We will have to return to the starting point to find ourselves again, and the female figure thus becomes a symbol of the one who allows us to be reborn.
The words 'partire' and 'partorire' both contain the concept of separation and detachment, and in every journey undertaken by Gianfranco Zenerato, there is this circular temporal reference—this departure and then return. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn our gaze to the past to preserve our roots, so as not to be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey puts rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, distorts the times of everyday life, and gives them different meanings.
Moving towards the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Starting out, one must face the separation from the 'old self,' made up of habits, roles, and certainties. However, starting out is also freedom, and even if this is limited because it involves facing the unknown, it manages to bring order to the past. The perspective in motion becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction in which one is heading, while the focal point of contraction is the direction from which one comes. In Zenerato's works, this sensation of originating from one place and heading towards another is evident. At the center is the female figure as a point of reference: it is the consciousness of the artist, the heart of the journey, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries, and emotions.
The future timeline representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost shattered because the artist himself does not recognize himself in such a placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate resignation to losing connection with the past, and even the elements of still life become, in some cases, almost absent and overshadowed by technological elements.
It then becomes essential to protect ourselves from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to seek refuge in something familiar and ancient where even 'illusions are real'.
With Gianfranco Zenerato, we truly have the opportunity to travel through dreams, signs, and symbols, where each of us will see ourselves reflected in a mirror. Leaving with him will mean temporarily darkening those mirrors in anticipation of discovering a different image of ourselves. Perhaps we will find our essence, realize the relativity of values and perspectives, both our own and others'. We may lose ourselves and then find ourselves again, becoming aware of a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical passatism with a language of pre-abstract figurative art, on the background of his internal historicizing cosmos, moves the mobile cursor of his emerging development consciousness, reaching the extreme urgencies of the present, subjecting his learned technique to the energy of dreams, signs, symbols, and above all, color—rich in clarity and timbral purity—to interact with the present, including the technological one. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge, reflecting variables of the late 20th-century citational transavant-garde... with Caravaggesque perspective overlaps... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance origin (Rembrandt...). Zenerato possesses creative potentials of broad historical scope, poetically combining them—assembling, making the soul's poetry harp vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and scanning along the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution—through hyperrealism of his visionary dream, an open window added to reason, engaging with the present.

Very interesting is your research: the depiction achieves scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dreams, myths, or everyday reality, all harmonized by a splendid chromatic play.


The artist of precision and modernity
Edited by Francesco Cairone


The most original authors are not because they promote what is new, but because they present what they have to say in such a way that it seems it has never been said before.
(Goethe)


It is necessary to start with Goethe's incisive phrase when discussing the rich and innovative painting of the artist Gianfranco Zenerato, because through that simple phrase a great truth is told: that almost everything has already been done in painting, and today, an artist seeking to establish their own individuality, without being influenced by currents and Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles because, as Giorgio Morandi also argued, 'There is nothing or very little new in the world anymore,' and therefore, to be original, one should paint considering social, technological, and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art belongs to everyone but is not for everyone; therefore, each person has the right to be moved in the presence of a masterpiece. However, painting and creating are gifts that God has granted only to a few chosen ones who, capable of seeing what others often do not even perceive, manage to transform the emotions that arise from small things— a gesture, a caress, a look— into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate individuals, Maestro Zenerato must undoubtedly be counted, a talented artist like few others, who makes meticulousness, rigor, and imagination his artistic style. Although reminiscent of past masters, he demonstrates that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, borrowing an impeccable technique from the greats. He exhibits a uniqueness and individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a rare exception in the national artistic scene.
Flower and fruit trees, lush and ripe, rest against tall, weathered marble walls often stained with the amorous drawings of two young lovers. They intertwine with objects of modern everyday life, such as a CD-ROM, a mouse, and a spatula, which become a link between the past, present, and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and welcomes the moon, intensifies even more what Zenerato depicts on the marble tablets in the foreground, where a more vivid color palette emerges—ranging from red, yellow, and green to all the warm tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this young and promising artist, a prose writer of art because he creates a style that is initially poetic and then pictorial, through which he manages to represent what he feels by filtering out the ugliness and negativity that our world carries with it.

They have written about him or judged his works.

Paolo Levi, Paolo Rizzi, Giammarco Puntelli, Giorgio Grasso, Sergio Capellini, Pietro Gasperini, Francois Buisson, R. Boschi, Michele Nocera, Carlo Alberto Gobbetti, Antonella Gotti, Gianni Ingolia, Dino Pasquali, Umberto Zaccaria, Umberto Tessari, Ottorino Stefani, Giulio Gasparotti, Carlo Federico Teodoro, Carlo Rigoni, Giorgio Trevisan, Vera Meneguzzo, Claudio Radaelli, Grillo Biagio, Luca Dall'olio, Franco Brescianini, Giovanni B. Bianchini, Mara Frignani, Aldo Tavella, Angelo Marchiori, Walter Coccetta, Paolo Baratella, Luciano Chinese, Luigi Consonni, Giuseppe Possa, Silvano Valentini, Siro Perin, Alfredo Pasolino, etc...

He has collaborated with the following galleries:

Galleria Cd Art Studio
Galleria New Dimensione Arte
Galleria Emmediarte
Galleria La Spadarina
Galleria l'Artista
Galleria Arttime
Galleria Orler