Gianfranco Zenerato - MODERN TOTEM

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

- 216 works sold
- 100% positive feedback
- 84 certified reviews

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

www.zenerato.com

One-of-a-kind 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 honored by institutions, critics and cultural organizations that acknowledged 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.

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

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

✓ Made with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each work a piece of strong visual and collector impact.

✓ Not mere decoration
Each work stems 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 solid presence in international collections.

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

"MODERN TOTEM"
An intensely symbolic work, the image takes shape as a post-digital icon that sublimates the everyday object — the mouse — into a contemporary relic. The surface, imbued with cryptic signs, brand icons and numerical glyphs, becomes a visual palimpsest of a cyber-tribal imaginary. The chiaroscuro, carved with almost Caravaggesque rigor, dialogues with gilding that evoke a profane liturgy, where technology becomes worship. The object is no longer a tool but a simulacrum: aestheticized, ritualized, coded.

Inserting "MODERN TOTEM" into your collection means enriching it with a work that combines visual strength and contemporary thought. It is a piece that dialogues with the great themes of our time — the relationship between humans and technology — and does so with rare artistic sensibility. This painting adds depth and coherence to a collection that aims to tell the present, to stand out, and to leave a trace.

One-of-a-kind 100% HAND-PAINTED
International Archival Certificate - Certificate of authenticity signed by the author - File containing the artist’s professional path - total dimensions including frame 48x58x3 cm - Acrylic and metallized pigments on panel - 2025
Ready to hang - Splendid baroque wooden frame of high quality, handcrafted

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

GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)
Active since 1990, he undertook 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 critiques from well-known sector experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that strand 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 mankind’s defeat can also be the threshold of a secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school, who with talent reconciles 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 classicity of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which distracts us from the dream. (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 novel is the blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops symbolic 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 calling him a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not present us with an absurd and unreal imaginary, but rather a reality familiar to us, with a purpose nonetheless communicative and highly symbolic. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This Gianfranco Zenerato painting 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 are left to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. He indeed 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 skill into a depiction of expectation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to make us encounter feelings again... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author relies on overlay and intersection of genres, on an allusive and incisive metaphorical research in subjects and colors. With a stunning insight he unifies past (still life), present (the female image), and future (symbolism, cryptic writing...) so that the work becomes both an artistic and literary and meta-narrative paradigm. The painter seeks to identify a new visual universe, probes the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reaffirms — thanks also to the dazzling chromies — how the genre-based approach still has rightful citizenship 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 over the years placed his vision in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal but now lost world, and a future full of artificial and artificial contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “drum” 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, placed 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 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 from his hands and thus feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicality 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, 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 temporal circular allusion, this leaving and then returning. When looking to the future, we can only turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, not to be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey places rationality and emotion 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. When starting, one must face separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom, even if it 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. In Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from a place and moving toward another. At the center 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 future temporal plane that represents the arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost eroded 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 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 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 himself reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily darkening those mirrors while waiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We might find our essence, become aware of the relativity of values and of our own and others’ points of view. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative art, within the inner historicizing cosmos broadens the mobile cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjecting his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and above all color, rich in clarity and timbral purity, to interact with the present even in a technological mode. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of postmodernist citational transavanguardia from the late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspectival overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has vast creative potential, poetically combining it, assembling, making the strings of the soul’s poetry resonate 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 his research: figuration achieves scenographic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, to myth, or to everyday 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 present 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 discuss the rich and innovative painting of artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this because through that simple phrase a great truth is told, namely that in painting almost everything has been done and today the artist who seeks to conquer his own individuality, without being influenced by currents and from the Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles because as Giorgio Morandi also claimed, “There is basically nothing or very little new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint keeping in mind social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art is for everyone but not for everyone; everyone thus has the right to be moved by 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 even perceive, transform the emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a look, into vibrant tones that color the dullness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate ones certainly stands Master Zenerato, a highly talented artist who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, while recalling past Masters in the mind, demonstrates that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, stealing from the greats an impeccable technique, presenting a uniqueness and a visible individuality in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, which makes him a rare exception in the national artistic panorama.
Flowers and ripe and lush fruit tapestries, laid on high marble walls worn by the years and often smeared 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 a bridge 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 more vibrant color range ranges from red, to yellow, to green, and to 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 pictorial, with which he manages to represent what he feels filtering the ugliness and negativities that our world carries with it.
Have people 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...

Galleria Cd Studio d'Arte
Galleria New Dimensione Arte
Galleria Emmediarte
Galleria La Spadarina
Galleria l'Artista
Galleria Arttime
Galleria Orler