Gianfranco Zenerato - ABSTRACT MOUSE

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ART COLLECTORS AND INVESTORS

Among the most acclaimed contemporary artists and fastest-growing on Catawiki, Gianfranco Zenerato has already won the trust of over 180 international collectors.

Add an exclusive and distinctive work to your collection, capable of enhancing the prestige of your art patrimony.

- 211 works sold
- 100% positive feedback
- 82 certified reviews

www.zenerato.com

Unique piece 100% HAND PAINTED - glows in the dark

WHY COLLECT A WORK BY GIANFRANCO ZENERATO

✓ Over 35 years of professional career
Active since 1990, Gianfranco Zenerato has developed over time a personal artistic language, recognizable and appreciated by collectors and art critics.

✓ More than 600 exhibitions and artistic events
A constant presence in the national and international art scene, built through decades of exhibition activity.

✓ Over 500 awards and recognitions
An artistic path acknowledged by institutions, critics and cultural organizations that have recognized its value and quality.

✓ Works in private and public collections
His paintings are part of collections in Italy, Europe, America and Asia, confirming international interest in his work.

✓ Esteemed by specialized critics
His artistic research has been analyzed and presented by authoritative critics and art historians, including Paolo Levi, Giammarco Puntelli, Sandro Serradifalco, Giorgio Grasso and many other professionals in the field.

✓ A unique and immediately recognizable style
Zenerato’s works unite figurative tradition, symbolism and contemporaneity. Each painting tells a story and invites the observer to a personal and always new reading.

✓ Works created with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece of strong visual and collecting impact.

✓ Not mere decoration
Each work arises from a research path developed over more than three decades of professional activity and represents a synthesis of the artist’s vision.

An opportunity for the collector

Acquiring a Gianfranco Zenerato work means owning an original piece created by an artist with a long documented career, hundreds of recognitions and a consolidated presence in international collections.

A piece designed not only to be admired today, but to maintain its artistic, cultural and collecting value over time.

Buying today a work like “ABSTRACT MOUSE” means taking a farsighted step, akin to those who, in the ferment of the sixties, recognized the disruptive force of a new artistic vision, seemingly incomprehensible at the time, but destined to redefine the parameters of contemporary art.
“ABSTRACT MOUSE” is not just a painting: it is an aesthetic and conceptual manifesto that intercepts the present time and transcends it. The everyday object, the chromatic layering, the tactile inlay simulating the technological surface — all contribute to a language that not only dialogues with art history but also relaunches it in another, reflective and unsettling dimension.
Whoever chooses to engage in dialogue with this vision today does not perform a simple act of collecting, but adheres to a deep intuition: that within a work of art there is not a decorative object, but a vector of meaning, a cultural investment capable of gaining relevance over time that challenges the market’s linear logic.
Just as happened then, in those crucial years when art seemed to lose every reference and yet was building the foundations of the present, today too some artists are tracing new horizons. “ABSTRACT MOUSE” is one of those clear, strong, unmistakable signals. And to recognize them before they become evident to everyone is a privilege of the few.

Unique piece 100% HAND PAINTED
International archival certificate - Certificate of authenticity signed by the author - File containing the artist’s professional path - Acrylic, phosphorescent pigments and quartz sand on panel - total dimensions including frame 48x58x3 cm - 2025
Ready to hang - Exquisite handcrafted baroque wooden frame (as in the photo)
(Modern icons series)

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR BIDDERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipments to non-EU countries are possible, but due to complex bureaucratic procedures (ministerial authorizations, customs formalities, etc.), extra costs apply, already included in the shipping costs indicated in the listing.
For the same reasons, delivery times may be longer than usual.
Thank you for your understanding.

GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has undertaken an artistic path that 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 critiques from well-known industry experts:

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

One notices 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 classicity of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, that diverts us from the dream. (Paolo Levi)

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

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

This Gianfranco Zenerato painting is technically well-structured, finely and richly articulated, and proposes the reality constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenographic component and those who scrutinize these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author has attributed to them. He indeed plays with symbols and allusions and enjoys confusing the 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 ability into a depiction of expectancy, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to make us meet again the feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author relies on overlay and intersection of genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphoric research into the 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 identify a new visual universe, to explore the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid so much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reaffirms — thanks also to the dazzling chromatics — that the approach tied to the genre still has citizenship in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato’s painting leads us to a vision of reality operated on three levels. It is a journey through time that we undertake with the artist, who through various experiments has over the years placed his vision in a present that “looks” at the past as an ideal but long-lost world, and a future full of artificial and artificious contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “drum” that we find as a fixed element tells us “attention,” time is running out, and the strong call of natural elements 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 placed in the midway between past and future.
Gianfranco like an Odysseus 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 from him and he feels, therefore, the need to return from where he started. Thus the 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 we have no choice but to turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, to not let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey puts rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, everyday times distort and take on different meanings.
Moving toward the future becomes a challenge, caught in the gaze of the feminine, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Starting out one must face the separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom and even if this freedom is limited because it 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 in which one is going, while the focus 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. In the center the female figure as a point of reference: it is the artist’s conscience, 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 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 those of the technological world.
It becomes fundamental, then, to protect oneself from this dangerous and almost uncontrollable future, 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 ourselves reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily darkening those mirrors in the waiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, we will realize the relativity of our values and points of view, ours and others. We may get lost and then find ourselves, realizing a common nature, a common destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historicizing 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 also technological. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of variables of late 20th-century postmodernist quotation… with Caravaggesque perspective overlays … and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt …). Zenerato has broad historical creative potential, knowing how to combine it poetically, assembling, making the strings of the poetry of the soul vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in 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: figurative reaches scenographic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, to myth, or to 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 sentence to speak of the rich and innovative painting of artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this because through that simple sentence a great truth is told, that in painting almost everything has been done and today the artist who seeks to conquer their own individuality, without being influenced by currents and Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles because, as Giorgio Morandi also argued, “There is little or nothing 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 has the right to be moved in the presence of a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God granted to only a few elect who, capable of seeing what others often do not 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 grey of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones one must surely count Master Zenerato, a talented artist like few, who makes minutely, rigor and fantasy a painting style that, while recalling past Masters in the mind, demonstrates that the artist has learned 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 landscape.
Floral canes and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high marble walls worn by the years and often defaced by 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 banishes on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color ever more vivid 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 first poetic and then painterly, with which he manages to represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativities that our world carries.

Some 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