Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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Unique piece 100% HAND PAINTED - glows in the dark

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 alongside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc.
• Reviewed by leading Italian critics.

"ICON" is a visual reflection on the sacredness of technology. The everyday object, a mouse, is sublimated into a relic of digital thought, a nucleus of chromatic energy that vibrates like an aura. The painting material becomes the language of the information flow, translating the mechanical gesture into inner perception. The artist transforms functionality into a symbol, returning to the present an image of worship: the icon of our connected time.

Owning ICON means safeguarding a fragment of the most authentic contemporary reality: a work that blends aesthetics, reflection and technological memory. A painting destined to become a testimony of our passage from the analog man to the digital man.

International archival certificate - Authenticity certificate signed by the author - File containing the artist’s professional trajectory
Unique work 100% HAND PAINTED - total dimensions including frame 38x38x4 cm - acrylic, metallic colors, luminescent pigments on gallery canvas - GLOWS IN THE DARK - 2026
Ready to hang - Frame included in the lot

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)
Active since 1990, he has undertaken 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 more than 500 prizes to his name, his creations enrich public and private collections of note 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 critiques from well-known sector experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of 1970s artists, stern messengers toward 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 rich in symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school, who with talent can reconcile research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes receiving from this emblematic image a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, a flower and a young woman. The classical nature of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which diverts us from dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this disturbing yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentialism and harmony of forms testifies to the 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-based 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 thus confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, since he does not present an absurd or unreal imaginary, but rather, he 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 those who scrutinize these messages must 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 weave of a history camouflaged in unreality. (Salvatore Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato we have an excellent idea, transformed with great skill into what is a figure of expectation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to make us reacquaint with feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author emphasizes the overlap and intersection of genres, in an incisive allusive and metaphorical research into subjects and colors. With a brilliant insight he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing ...) so that the work becomes an artistic but also literary and metanarrative paradigm. The painter should seek to identify a new visual universe, probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid so much noise — is still an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reaffirms — also thanks to the vivid chromies — how the approach tied to the genre still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato’s painting leads us to a three-level vision of reality. It is a journey through time that we undertake with the artist, who through various experiments has come to place his view in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal world, but now lost, and to a future full of artificial and artificial contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” we find as a fixed element is telling us “attention,” time is about to run out, and the strong recall of natural elements 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 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 the mother-Earth set in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like Odysseus, ventures in this temporal dimension, seeking 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 in the face of the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, which is slipping away and he feels, therefore, the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, where the journey is this eternal appeal to life and death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves and the female figure 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 leaving and then returning. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn to the past to not lose our roots, to not let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey places rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, everyday times distort and acquire different meanings.
Moving toward the future becomes a challenge, seen in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. When starting out one must face separation from the “old self,” composed of habits, roles, and certainties. Departing is still freedom, even if limited because one steps into the unknown, it manages to restore 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 you feel this sense of coming from one place and heading toward another. In the center the female figure as point of reference: 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 herself in that position: it is as if the loss of identity were a desolate resignation to losing the bond with the past, and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by the technological ones.
It becomes fundamental, then, to protect oneself from this future, which advances perilously and almost uncontrollably, and retreat into something known and ancient where even “illusions are real.”
With Gianfranco Zenerato we really 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 will perhaps find our essence, realize the relativity of values and the points of view of ourselves and others. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, a common fate, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical passatismo with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the background of his inner historicizing cosmos widens the moving 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 color, rich in clarity and timbric purity, to interact with the present even in a technological form. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of variables of late 20th-century transavant-garde with citational references ... with Caravaggian perspective overlaps ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has broad creative potential in historical scope, knowing how to combine them poetically, assembling, making the harp 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: figurative art achieves 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 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 as if 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 you tell a great truth, namely that 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 argued, “There is nothing or very little new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint taking into account social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art is for everyone but not for everyone, everyone therefore has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creating is a gift that God has granted only to a few elect who, able to see what others often do not perceive, manage to transform the emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a gaze, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate ones one must certainly include Master Zenerato, a talented artist who makes minutiae, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, while recalling past Masters, proves that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, stealing from the greats an impeccable technique, presenting a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in each single creation, which makes him a white crow in the national artistic panorama.
Canestry of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high marble walls worn by time and often stained 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 the linking ring 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 stronger vigor what Zenerato bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color ever more vivid ranges from red, to yellow, to green, and to all the warmest tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this young and promising artist, an author of prose in art because he creates a first poetic and then pictorial style, with which he manages to represent what he feels by filtering 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, Ruggero 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