Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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Over 180 collectors have purchased Gianfranco Zenerato's works on Catawiki.

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205 WORKS SOLD - 100% Positive - 78 Reviews

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Unique large piece 100% HAND-PAINTED ON HIGH-QUALITY BLACK VELVET
(Painting with luminescent colors)

Gianfranco Zenerato (Professional Artist - Italy)

• Active since 1990, with over 600 participations in national and international art events.
• Recognized for the high quality of his 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.

ICON is more than a work: it is a visual archetype, a contemporary relic that transforms the mouse - a daily object - into a sacred symbol, a totem of our time.
Deeply set against the black velvet background, acrylic and luminescent colors explode like electric impulses, signals between mind and machine.
Each gesture is a tension between instinct and control, between chaos and form, between human and digital.
The work does not describe; it evokes. It does not represent; it transmits. Here matter becomes language and the object is transfigured into an icon.
Buying ICON means entering into contact with a magnetic and living symbol.
It is a work that is not merely contemplated, but experienced. It cannot be owned, but it owns you.
Those who choose it make a radical gesture: they seize a fragment of the present and transform it into living memory.
ICON looks at you. It calls you. It welcomes you.

International Archival Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - File containing the artist's professional trajectory
One-of-a-kind hand-painted piece - total dimensions including frame 45x55x5.5 cm - acrylic, metallic pigments and luminescent colors on fine black velvet - 2025
Ready to hang - Beautiful high-quality wooden frame prepared artisanally
(Modern icons series)

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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, receiving national and international recognitions for the quality of his works. With over 500 prizes to his name, his creations enrich significant 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 well-known art critic, Prof. Giammarco Puntelli.

Some of the myriad reviews from renowned art experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of artists from the seventies, stern messengers to Western society. While the Milanese Antonio Recalcati and the Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato carries a poignant warning, where the defeat of man can also mark the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from modern school, who with talent reconciles exploration with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes in this emblematic image a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, a flower and a young woman. The classical stillness interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, that keeps us from dreaming. (Paolo Levi)

In this disturbing yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentiality and the harmony of forms testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a skilled artist. Interesting and original is the mixture of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

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

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

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

The author relies on the overlay and intersection of genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphorical search in subjects and colors. With a brilliant intuition he unifies past (still life), present (the feminine image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing ...) so that the work becomes an artistic but also literary and metanarrative paradigm. The painter is urged to discover a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reaffirmed — also thanks to dazzling chromatics — shows how the genre-based approach still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato’s painting leads us to a three-level view of reality. It is a journey through time that we undertake with the artist, who through different experiments has come to place his vision in the present that “looks” to the past as an ideal world, but now lost, and a future full of artificial and pretentious contaminations.
It is a warning and a caution the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” that we find as a fixed element tells us “attention,” time is running out, and the strong call of natural elements placed in the foreground, contaminated by objects of the technological world (the mouse, the CD or the alarm clock) emphasize how important it is not to sever the bond with the past, with a world in which 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 Odysseus, travels in this temporal dimension, in search of the forces that support and shape us, alter or govern our fate. Driven toward the future, the man-artist faces the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility before the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, which is slipping from his hands and thus feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, in which the journey is this eternal call to life and to death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves, and the female figure thus becomes the 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 then return. When looking to the future, we cannot but 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, raises doubts and fears, the rhythms of daily life distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the gaze of the feminine, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Starting requires facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom, and even if this is limited because we go toward the unknown, it manages to order the past. The moving perspective 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, and in Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from a place and heading toward another. At the center is 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 timeline representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost eroded because the artist himself does not identify with that placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate 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 then becomes essential to shield oneself from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to seek 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 our own reflection 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 our own and others’ points of view. We may lose ourselves and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classic pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the background of his inner historizing cosmos, widens the moving 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 above all the color, rich in clarity and timbral purity, to interact with the technologically present today. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of twenty-first-century transavant-garde citations, 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 lute 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 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 Precision 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 makes it seem it has never been said before. (Goethe)

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

They say art is for everyone but not for everyone; everyone thus 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, from a caress, from a look, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones one must certainly include Master Zenerato, a talented artist who makes minutiae, rigor and imagination a painterly style that, although recalling to mind past Masters, proves that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, stealing impeccable technique from the greats, presenting a uniqueness and an evident individuality in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a white crow in the national artistic panorama.
Bunches of flowers and ripe, lush fruit rest against high marble walls worn by time and often smeared with amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwined 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 salutes the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges with even greater vigor what Zenerato banishes on the matte boards in the foreground, in which a color ever more vivid ranges 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, with which he can represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativity that our world carries with it.

People who 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 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