Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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

ADD THIS EXCLUSIVE PAINTING TO YOUR COLLECTION!!!

208 WORKS SOLD - 100% Positive - 78 Reviews

www.zenerato.com

Unique Piece 100% HAND-PAINTED
(Painting with luminescent colors on fine black velvet)

• Active since 1990, with over 600 participation 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.
• Exhibited alongside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc.
• Reviewed by leading Italian critics.

International Archival Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - Folder containing the artist’s professional path
Unique piece painted 100% by hand - overall dimensions including frame 36x42x5 cm - acrylic and luminescent colors on fine black velvet - the painting glows in the dark - 2025
Ready to be hung - Splendid high-quality wooden frame handcrafted
(Modern icons series)

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.
In the deep background of the black velvet, acrylic and luminescent colors explode like electric pulses, signals between mind and machine.
Every gesture is 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 transfigures into an icon.
Buying ICON means entering contact with a magnetic, living symbol.
It is a work not to be contemplated but experienced. It is not possessed, but possesses you.
Whoever chooses it makes a radical gesture: seizes a fragment of the present and transforms it into living memory.
ICON looks at you. Calls you. Welcomes you.

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For the same reasons, delivery times may be longer than usual.
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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 awards to his name, his creations enrich notable 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 well-known experts in the art field:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of artists from the seventies, severe messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato carries a poignant warning, where the defeat of man can also represent the threshold of a secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter of a 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, of a flower and of a young woman. The classicism of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which diverts us from dreams. (Paolo Levi)

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

Gianfranco Zenerato develops sign-based narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary, organized according to ordered sequences of his mental elaborations. His fantastic constructions could therefore confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not offer us an unreal or impossible imagination, but rather paints a reality familiar to us, with a purpose that is communicative and highly symbolic. (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 for those who scrutinize these messages, it remains to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. Indeed, he plays with symbols and allusions and enjoys confusing the interpretive coordinates of what could be the weave of a story camouflaged in 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 make our emotions meet again... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author relies on the overlap and intersection of genres, on a provocative and metaphorical research into subjects and colors. With a brilliant instinct he unifies past (still life), present (the feminine image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing…) so that the work becomes both an artistic and literary and metanarrative paradigm. He presses the painter to identify 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, then, reaffirmed — even thanks to the striking chromatic ranges — how the genre’s approach still has a rightful place 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 over the years positioned 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 artificed contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice the message that emerges from the elements surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” that 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 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 Odyssey, 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 before the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, that is slipping away and therefore he feels the need to return to where he started. Thus, cyclicity returns in which the journey is this eternal call to life and death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves, and the female figure thus becomes a symbol of she 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 there remains nothing but to turn our gaze to the past in order not to lose our roots, not to be unmanned by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey places rationality and emotions on the same level, gives rise to doubts and fears, everyday times 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. When departing one must face separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom and even if this is limited because one goes toward 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 hub 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 the female figure as a reference point: it is the artist’s consciousness, the heart of going, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries and emotions.
The future temporal plane that represents arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a mournful resignation to the loss of ties with the past and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by those of the technological world.
It becomes essential, then, to protect 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 chance to travel through dreams, signs and symbols, where each of us will see ourselves reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean briefly darkening those mirrors while awaiting 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, recognizing a common nature, a shared destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classic pastismo with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historizing cosmos widens the moving cursor of his emerging developmental consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjugating his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and above all to color, rich in brightness and timbral purity, to interact with the present even technologically. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of the trans-avant-garde citational of late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspectival overlaps ... and modern post-Renaissance-influenced psychology (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has vast historical creative potential, cleverly combining it poetically, assembling, making the lyre of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and scanning on 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: the figuration reaches scenographic 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 play.

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 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 because through that simple sentence a great truth is told, namely that in painting almost everything has already been done and today the artist who seeks to conquer his own individuality, without being influenced by currents and by the Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles, because as Giorgio Morandi also said “There is little or nothing new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint while keeping 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 are a gift that God has granted only to a chosen few who, able to see what others often do not even perceive, manage to transform the emotions arising from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a look, into vibrant tones that color the greyness of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones we must certainly count Maestro Zenerato, a gifted artist who makes meticulousness, rigor and imagination a painting style that, while recalling past masters, shows that the artist has valued the lessons of fine painting, stealing an 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 rare exception in the national artistic panorama.
Flower canopies and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high walls of marble worn by the years and often smeared with the amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern daily life, such as a CD-ROM, a mouse, a spatula, which become the 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 bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where an increasingly vivid color ranges from red, to yellow, to green, and 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 initially poetic and then painterly, with which he manages to represent what he feels, filtering the ugliness and negativities 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 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