Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ART COLLECTORS AND INVESTORS

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

ADD TO YOUR COLLECTION AN EXCLUSIVE AND DISTINCTIVE WORK CAPABLE OF ENHANCING THE PRESTIGE OF YOUR ART HERITAGE!

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

www.zenerato.com

Dear Collectors,
if you happen to be on vacation or temporarily away, I invite you to contact me to agree together on the delivery schedule of the purchased lot. I will be happy to accommodate your organizational needs so that the delivery occurs in the most convenient times and ways for you.

One-of-a-kind piece 100% HAND-PAINTED

WHY COLLECT A GIANFRANCO ZENERATO WORK

✓ 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 recognized by institutions, critics and cultural organizations for its value and quality.

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

✓ Appreciated 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 merge figurative tradition, symbolism and contemporaneity. Each painting tells a story and invites the viewer to a personal and ever-new reading.

✓ Works created with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece a work with 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 work designed not only to be admired today, but to maintain its artistic, cultural and collecting value over time.

One-of-a-kind piece 100% HAND-PAINTED
International Archive Certificate - Certificate of authenticity - Portfolio containing the artist’s professional journey - total dimensions including frame 58x48x4cm - acrylic, metallized pigments and sand on panel - 2026
Ready to hang - Splendid high-quality baroque wooden frame handcrafted

METAPHYSICAL MOUSE
In “Metaphysical Mouse” the everyday object is stripped of its function and handed over to thought. The mouse is no longer a peripheral but a presence: a compact, almost animal body, that observes and holds silence.
The numbers and the engraved sign act as coordinates of an invisible code, suggesting that behind the interface there extends a mental territory. Controlled light and the sparse space isolate the form, transforming it into an emblem of an era in which the boundary between organic and artificial has already been surpassed.
It does not represent technology: it questions it.
Owning it means guarding a clear symbol of our contemporary condition.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR BIDDERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
shipments to non-EU countries are possible, but due to complex bureaucratic procedures (ministerial authorizations, customs paperwork, etc.), additional costs are expected, already included in the shipping costs listed in the listing.
For the same reasons, delivery times could be longer than usual.
Thank you for your understanding.

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 over 500 awards to his name, his creations enrich prominent 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 numerous reviews by renowned experts in the field of art:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that line of artists from the seventies, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato instead bears a poignant warning, where man’s defeat may also represent the threshold of a secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from the modern school, who skillfully 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, which diverts us from 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 mastery of a skilled artist. Interesting and original is the blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato elaborates 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. This is not correct, because he does not present us with an absurd and unreal imagination, 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 constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenic component, and those who scrutinize these messages remain to 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 intertwining of a story camouflaged in unreality. (S. Russo)

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

The author focuses on the overlay and intersection of genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphorical research in subjects and colors. With a startling intuition, he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing...) so that the work becomes an artistic yet literary and meta-narrative paradigm. The painter is driven to discover a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid much clamor — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reaffirms — also thanks to the striking chromatic colors — how the approach tied to the genre still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

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” 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 caution the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “drum” that we find as a fixed element says to us “pay 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 Mother-Earth placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like 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, which is slipping from his hands and thus feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, where the journey is this eternal call to life and to death. We will have to return to the starting point to find ourselves again, and the female figure thus becomes the symbol of she who allows us to be reborn.
The words “leave” and “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 return. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn to the past to not lose our roots, not to let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey places rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, the times of daily life distort and acquire different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, caught in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Departing means facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Leaving is still freedom and even if it 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 in which one is going, while the axis of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and in Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from one place and moving toward another. In the center the female figure as a reference point: it is the artist’s conscience, the heart of going, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries and emotions.
The future time 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 such a placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate resignation to the loss of connections 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 therefore becomes essential to protect oneself from this advancing 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 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 perspectives ours and others. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, a common destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classic pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historicizing cosmos, broadens the moving cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subduing his learned technique to the energy of dream, of sign, of symbol and especially of color, rich in clarity, 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 transavant-garde citational of late 20th century onward... with Caravaggian perspective overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has wide creative potential historically, skillfully combining it poetically, assembling, making the strings of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in scanning the cursor of his endless 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 achieves scenographic effects in a space in which 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 Discipline 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 as if it had never been said before. (Goethe)

It is necessary to start from Goethe’s incisive phrase to talk about the rich and innovative painting of the artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this because through that simple sentence a great truth is told, 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 claimed “There is essentially nothing or very little new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint with awareness of 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 in the presence of a masterpiece, but painting and creating is a gift that God has granted only to a few 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 grayness of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones surely stands Maestro Zenerato, a artist talented as few, who makes meticulousness, 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 a visible individuality in that touch of elegant modernity present in each single creation, making him a white crow in the national artistic panorama.
Bunches of flowers and ripe, lush fruit rest on high walls of marble worn by the years and often stained 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 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 even more vigorously what Zenerato bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color increasingly vivid stands out ranging from red, to yellow, to green, and to all the warm tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this young and promising artist, prose writer of art because he creates a style that is first poetic and then pictorial, with which he manages to represent what he feels 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