Gianfranco Zenerato - BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT - XXL

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Over 180 collectors have purchased works by Gianfranco Zenerato on Catawiki.

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International storage certificate - Certificate of authenticity signed by the author - File containing the artist's artistic journey
Unique large piece painted by hand - Oil on canvas already mounted on a wooden frame - Total dimensions including frame 101x121x2.5 - 2003
Ready to be hung - The hand-painted frame is an integral part of the artwork.

Between Past and Present
The work reactivates the sacred icon, with a clear reference to Madonna Benois in the intimacy of the gesture, projecting it into a contemporary horizon. The past becomes a living experience, the present contemplates it and questions it.
In the still life, mouse and CD replace the traditional symbols.
Tools of mediation and archiving, alluding to knowledge now entrusted to the digital interface. The sacred does not dissolve but changes form. The '?' and 'X' buttons turn the image into a portal: you can explore or withdraw.
For the collector, it is a work that does not decorate but invites meditation, blending art history and technological awareness, making it a cultivated and contemplative choice.

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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 criticisms from renowned industry experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that stream of 1970s artists, stern messengers towards Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato is instead a bearer of a poignant warning, where man's defeat can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision rich in symbolic meanings, of a modern school painter who, with talent, balances 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 interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which 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 the mastery of a skilled artist. The intriguing and unprecedented fusion of flowers, fruits, and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato creates sign-based narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary world, 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 world, 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, focusing on an allusive and metaphorical search that is incisive in 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 but also literary and meta-narrative. The painter aims to identify a new visual universe, explore the limits of traditional iconography, and demonstrate how painting today — amidst much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist's creativity then reaffirms — also thanks to the vibrant chromatics — how the approach related to genre still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato's painting guides us to a vision 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 place his vision in a present that 'looks' to the past as an ideal world, but now lost, and to a future full of artificial and artificialistic 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 emphasis on natural elements in the foreground, contaminated by objects from the technological world (the mouse, the CD, or the alarm clock), underscores how important it is not to sever the connection with the past, a world where nature was predominant.
The female element, positioned on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of Mother Earth placed in the middle ground 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 then feels the need to return to where he started. Thus, cyclicality reemerges, where the journey is this eternal call between life and death. We will need 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, and to avoid being 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 requires facing the separation from the 'old self,' made up of habits, roles, and certainties. However, setting out is also freedom, and even if this is limited because it involves 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, the female figure serves as a point of reference: it is the artist's consciousness, the heart of the journey, with its rhythms, noises, timings, difficulties, discoveries, and emotions.
The timeline of the future 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 dismal resignation to the loss of 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 get lost and then find ourselves again, becoming aware of a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical passatismo with a language of pre-figurative abstraction, on the background of his internal historicizing cosmos, moves the mobile cursor of his emerging development consciousness, up to the extreme emergencies 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 even technological present. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge, reflecting variables of the late 20th-century citational transavantgarde... 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 lyre vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and scanning along the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution—through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, an open window added to reason, engaging in dialogue 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...