Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

IDEAL FOR INVESTMENT - AMONG THE TOP 5 RAPIDLY RISING ARTISTS ON CATAWIKI
Over 180 collectors have purchased Gianfranco Zenerato's works on Catawiki.

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208 WORKS SOLD - 100% Positive - 80 Reviews

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Unique piece 100% HAND-PAINTED
(Painted with luminescent colors)

Gianfranco Zenerato (Professional Artist - Italy)

• Active since 1990, with over 600 participations in 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.

International Archival Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - Folder containing the artist’s professional path
Unique piece 100% HAND-PAINTED - total dimensions including frame 33.5x33.5x6.5 cm - acrylic, metallized pigments and luminescent varnishes - 2026
Ready to hang - Beautiful wooden frame included in the lot (as in the photo).

"ICON" is a visual reflection on the sacredness of technology. The everyday object, a mouse, is sublimated into a relic of digital thought, the center of a chromatic energy that vibrates like an aura. The painting surface 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 reverence: the icon of our connected time.
Owning ICON means guarding a fragment of the most authentic contemporaneity: a work that blends aesthetics, reflection and technological memory. A painting destined to become a testament to our passage from the analog man to the digital man.

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has pursued an artistic path that has led him to take part in over 600 art events, receiving national and international recognitions for the quality of his works. With over 500 prizes to his name, his creations enrich important 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 world:

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 man’s defeat may also be the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school who skillfully reconciles research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes from 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, that distracts us from the dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this disturbing 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 original is the mix of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops symbolic narratives that unfold step by step the infinite possibilities of a fertile imagination, organized according to orderly sequences of his mental elaborations. His fanciful constructions could confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not present an absurd imaginary or unreal, but rather 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 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 misaligning 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 figurative form of waiting, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to reconnect us with feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author focuses on layering and intersection of genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphorical exploration of subjects and colors. With a brilliant intuition he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing ...) so the work becomes an artistic and literary and metanarrative paradigm. He pushes the painter to identify a new visual universe, to explore the limits of traditional iconography to prove how painting today — amid much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reaffirmed — also thanks to the radiant chromatic tones — how the gender-related approach still has the right to citizenship 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 different experiments has come to place his vision in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal but now lost world, and to a future full of artificial and pretended contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas surrounding his overall view. The “drum” that we find as a fixed element tells us “attention,” time is about to run out, and the strong appeal 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, located on the present temporal plane, represents the archetype of the Earth-mother placed in the middle ground 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, which is slipping away from him and he 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 must return to the starting point to find ourselves, and the female figure becomes therefore 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 departing and then returning. When looking to the future we can only 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 plane, arouses doubts and fears, the times of everyday life distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the gaze of the woman, 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 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 expansion flow is the direction one is going, while the contraction’s core is the direction one comes from, and in Zenerato’s works one has the sense of coming from one place and going toward another. In 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 time plane representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost eroded because the artist himself does not recognize himself in such a placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a desolate resignation to the loss of ties with the past, and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overpowered by the technological ones.
It becomes fundamental, then, to protect ourselves 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 dimming those mirrors in anticipation of discovering a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, realize the relativity of values and points of view—both ours and others. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, becoming aware of a common nature, fate, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pasticism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, within the backdrop of his inner historicizing cosmos, moves the mobile cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme emergencies of the present, subjugating 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 technologically. His modernity is genuinely psychological and expressive of his intense expressive charge of the trans-avant-garde quotationist late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque-depth overlay... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has broad creative potential historically, skillfully combining it poetically, assembling, letting the lyre 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 his research: figuration achieves scenographic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted turn by turn 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 seems 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 Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is because through that simple phrase a great truth is told: 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 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 thus has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God has granted only to a few elect who, capable of seeing what others often do not 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 one must certainly count Master Zenerato, a talented artist like few, who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, although recalling past Masters, shows that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, stealing an impeccable technique from the greats, presenting a uniqueness and an individuality visible 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, laid against high marble walls worn by time 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 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 tablets in the foreground, where a brighter color range stands out 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 can represent what he feels, filtering the ugliness and negativity that our world carries with it.

Authors 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...

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