Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

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Over 180 collectors have purchased Gianfranco Zenerato’s works on Catawiki.
AMONG THE TOP 5 RISING ARTISTS ON CATAWIKI

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198 Pieces sold - 100% Positive - 75 Reviews

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

International Archiving Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - File containing the artist’s professional trajectory
Single piece hand-painted - total dimensions including frame 58x48x4 cm - acrylic, metallized pigments and sand on panel - 2025
Ready to hang - Gorgeous high-quality baroque wood frame handcrafted

METAPHYSICAL MOUSE
In “Metaphysical Mouse” the everyday object is stripped of its function and delivered to thought. The mouse is no longer a peripheral but a presence: a compact, almost animal-like body that observes and holds silence.
The numbers and the engraved sign act as coordinates of an invisible code, suggesting that behind the interface lies a mental territory. The controlled light and the sparse space isolate the form, transforming it into the emblem of an era where the boundary between organic and artificial has already been surpassed.
It does not represent technology: it questions it.
Owning it means preserving a sharp symbol of our contemporary condition.

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has pursued an artistic path that has led him to participate in over 600 art events, earning national and international recognition for the quality of his works. With over 500 awards to his credit, 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 renowned experts in the art world:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of 1970s artists, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato, on the contrary, is a bearer of a poignant warning, where man’s defeat can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meaning, of a painter from a modern school who talentfully reconciles research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes from this emblematic image a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, of 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 disturbing yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic simplicity and harmony of forms testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a capable artist. Interesting and original is the blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops sign-formation narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary, organized according to ordered sequences of his mental elaborations. His fanciful constructions could therefore confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not present an absurd or unreal imaginary, but rather, he paints a reality familiar to us, with a communicative and highly symbolic purpose. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well structured, finely and richly articulated, and proposes the reality built by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenographic component, and those who study these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. He indeed plays with symbols and allusions and enjoys confusing the interpretive coordinates of what could be the tangled web of a story camouflaged as unreality. (S. Russo)

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

The author relies on overlapping and intersecting genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphoric research into subjects and colors. With sudden insight, he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing...) so that the work becomes both an artistic and literary, meta-narrative paradigm. He presses the painter to identify a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reinforces, thanks also to the vivid colors, how the approach tied to the genre still has rightful citizenship in 21st-century painting.

Zenerato’s painting leads us to a three-level vision of reality. It is a time-travel journey that the artist takes us on, who through various experiments has over the years placed 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 pretended contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice that emerges from the elements arranged on the canvas surrounding his vision of the whole. The “battery” we find as a fixed element is telling us “attention,” time is about to run out, and 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) emphasize how important it is not to sever the link with the past, with a world where nature was predominant.
The female element, placed on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of Mother-Earth set in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like an Ulysses, travels in this temporal dimension, in search of the forces that sustain and shape us, alter or govern our fate. Pushed toward the future, the man-artist faces the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility facing the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, which is slipping from his grasp and he feels, therefore, the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns where the journey is this eternal call to life and death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves, and the female figure then becomes a symbol of the one who allows us to be reborn.
The words “to depart” and “to give birth” 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 return. When looking to the future, we can only turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, to avoid being dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey places rationality and emotions on the same level, arouses doubts and fears, daily times distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Beginning implies facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom, and even if it is limited because it leads to the unknown, it manages to bring order to the past. The moving perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction one is going, while the focal point of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and in Zenerato’s works you feel this sense of coming from one place and heading toward another. At the center the female figure as a point of reference: it is the artist’s consciousness, the heart of going, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries and emotions.
The future time plane that represents arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbling because the artist himself does not recognize himself in such a place: it is as if a loss of identity were a dreary resignation to losing ties with the past, and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by technological ones.
It becomes fundamental, then, to protect oneself from this advancing future, which moves forward dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to take refuge in something known and ancient where even “illusions are real.”
With Gianfranco Zenerato we truly have the possibility to travel through dreams, signs and symbols, where each of us will see himself reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily darkening those mirrors in anticipation of discovering a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, realize the relativity of values and of our own and others’ points of view. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a shared nature, fate, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historicizing cosmos, widens the movable cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjugating his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and especially color, rich in clarity, and timbral purity, to interact with the even technologically present present. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of transavant-garde citationalism from late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspective overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has broad historical creative potential, knowing how to poetically combine it, assembling, making the strings of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in scanning the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, a window opened added to reason, dialoguing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting is his research: figuration achieves scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, to myth, or to everyday reality, all harmonized by a splendid chromatic game.

The Artist of rigor and modernity
Edited by Francesco Cairone

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

It is necessary to start from Goethe’s incisive phrase to talk about the rich and innovative painting of Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is because through that simple sentence a great truth is told: in painting, everything has already been done, and today the artist who seeks to conquer his own individuality, without being influenced by currents and Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles, because as Giorgio Morandi also stated, “There is nothing or very little new in the world,” hence to be original one should paint bearing in mind social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art is for everyone but not for everyone; everyone has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God has granted only to a few elect who, capable of seeing what others often do not even perceive, manage to transform the emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, a caress, a gaze, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate people one must certainly count Maestro Zenerato, a talented artist like few, who makes minutiae, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, although recalling past Masters, shows that the artist has learned the lessons of fine painting, stealing from the greats an impeccable technique, presents a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, which makes him a rare bird in the national artistic panorama.
Cups of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high marble walls worn by the years and often smudged with amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern daily life, such as a CD-ROM, a mouse, a spatula, which become links between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges with even greater vigor what Zenerato bans on the marble tables in the foreground, where a color increasingly vivid stands out, ranging from red to yellow to green, and to all the warmer 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 first poetic and then pictorial, through which he can represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativity that our world carries.

Who has 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 Studio d'Arte
Galleria New Dimensione Arte
Galleria Emmediarte
Galleria La Spadarina
Galleria l'Artista
Galleria Arttime
Galleria Orler