Gianfranco Zenerato - DYSTOPIAN

IDEAL FOR INVESTMENT - AMONG THE 5 FASTEST-RISING ARTISTS ON CATAWIKI
Over 180 collectors have purchased Gianfranco Zenerato’s works on Catawiki.

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205 artworks sold - 100% Positive - 78 Reviews

Unique piece, 100% HAND-PAINTED
(The frame in the photos is purely demonstrative and not included in the lot)

www.zenerato.com

GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)
• Active since 1990, with over 600 appearances at 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 beside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc.
• Reviewed by leading Italian critics.

Unique hand-painted piece
International Archival Certificate - Certificate of authenticity signed by the artist - File containing the artist’s professional record - Dimensions 30x40x4 cm - Acrylic on canvas mounted on a high-thickness gallery frame - 2026
Ready to hang - DOES NOT REQUIRE A FRAME

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has embarked on an artistic path that has led him to participate in over 600 art events, receiving national and international recognition for the quality of his works. With over 500 prizes to his name, his creations enrich notable public and private collections in Italy, Europe, America and Asia. He has exhibited beside 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 criticisms from renowned sector experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to the current of artists of the seventies, stern messengers toward Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato is a bearer of a poignant warning, where humanity’s defeat can also represent the vestibule to a secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, by a painter of modern school, who with talent reconciles research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One notices in this emblematic image 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, that diverts us from dreams. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling 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 blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops signic narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary, organized according to orderly sequences of his mental processes. His fantastical constructions could thus confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. That is not correct, as he does not propose an absurd and unreal imaginary, but rather 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 reality constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenic component, and those who scrutinize these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. He plays with symbols and allusions and enjoys confusing interpretive coordinates of what could be the weave of a story camouflaged as unreality. (S. Russo)

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

The author relies on the overlay and intersection of genres, on an allusive and incisive 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 artwork becomes an artistic but also literary and metanarrative paradigm. He presses the painter to identify a new visual universe, to explore the limits of traditional iconography to prove how painting today — amid much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reaffirms — also thanks to the dazzling chromatics — how the approach tied to the genre still has a right to citizenship in 21st-century painting.

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 various experiments, has gradually 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 artifice. It is a warning and notice conveyed by the elements surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” 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 where nature was predominant.
The female element, positioned on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of the mother-Earth placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like Odysseus, travels in this temporal dimension, seeking the forces that support 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 before the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, which is slipping away, and he feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, where the journey is this eternal call to life and death. We will have to return to the starting point to rediscover ourselves, and the feminine 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, all that remains is to turn our gaze to the past to keep 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 acquire different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the gaze of the female, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Beginning means facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom, and even if this is limited because one faces 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 core of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and in Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from one 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 temporal plane of the future representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled 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 the loss of connection with the past, and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by the technological ones.
Therefore it becomes essential to protect against 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 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 viewpoints, 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 classic pastiche with a language of pre-abstract figurative, within the background of his interior historizing cosmos, moves the movable cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme emergencies of the present, subduing 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 present even technological. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of the postmodern “transavant-garde” in its late 20th-century evolution... with Caravaggesque perspectival overlays... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has broad creative potential, poetically combining them, assembling, making the string 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 plus to reason. dialoguing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting his research: figurative reaches scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, myth, or daily 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 express 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 phrase to speak of the rich and innovative painting of Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is 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 currents and the Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles, because as Giorgio Morandi also maintained, “There is little or nothing new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint considering social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art belongs to everyone but not to everyone; everyone has the right to be emotionally moved before a masterpiece, but painting and creating is a gift that God has granted only to a few chosen ones who, able to see 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 gloom of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones one must certainly include Maestro Zenerato, a talented artist who makes minutiae, rigor and fantasy a painting style that, although recalling past masters, proves that the artist has learned from the lessons of beautiful 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.
Blooms of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid against high marble walls worn by the years and often smeared with amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern everyday life, like a CD-ROM, a mouse, a spatula, which become a link 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 force what Zenerato banishes on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color ever more vivid stands out, ranging from red to yellow to green, and all the warmer tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to dominate 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, filtering the ugliness and negativity that our world carries.
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 Studio d'Arte
Galleria New Dimensione Arte
Galleria Emmediarte
Galleria La Spadarina
Galleria l'Artista
Galleria Arttime
Galleria Orler