Gianfranco Zenerato - I AM NOT A MOUSE

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Gianfranco Zenerato (Professional Artist - Italy)

• Active since 1990, with over 600 participation in national and international art events.
• Recognized for the high quality of works, with over 500 prizes received.
• 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 Archiving Certificate - Certificate of Authentication - File containing the artist's professional career
Single piece, hand-painted - total dimensions including frame 38x33.5x5 cm - acrylics, metallic pigments, luminescent colors - 2026
Ready to be hung - Stunning high-quality wooden Baroque frame prepared by hand

I AM NOT A MOUSE
The work asserts an identitarian negation: the object declares that it does not coincide with its function. The mouse, icon of the interface, is extracted from the operational flow and transformed into mute, almost liturgical presence, marked by engravings that evoke an indecipherable writing.
The underlying geometric surface is not space but a fragment of a system: a post-use environment where technology survives as a trace. The frame, redundant and ornamental, institutionalizes the device, withdraws it from consumption and consecrates it as a conceptual relic.
Here identity is not given by utility but by removal. “I am not a mouse” becomes an ontological statement: what was interface becomes enigma.

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has pursued 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 well-known art critic, Prof. Giammarco Puntelli.

Some of the countless reviews by renowned experts in the art world:
Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of 1970s artists, stern messengers to Western society. While the Milanese Antonio Recalcati and the Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato, on the contrary, bears a poignant warning, where mankind’s defeat may also herald the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school, who with talent reconciles search and experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One senses 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 grey world, the contemporary one, which diverts 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 novel is the blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops sign-typename narratives that gradually unveil 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 accurate, as he does not offer an absurd or unreal imagery, 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 scenic component, and those who probe these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author attributes to them. He plays with symbols and references and enjoys confusing the interpretive coordinates of what could be the plot of a story camouflaged as unreality. (S. Russo)

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

The author relies on overlapping and intersecting genres, on a pointed allusive and metaphoric research in subjects and colors. With luminous insight he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (the symbolism, the cryptic writing...) so that the work becomes an artistic but also literary and metanarrative paradigm. He presses the painter to identify a new visual universe, to explore the limits of traditional iconography to show how painting today—amidst so much noise—still has a rightful place 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” to the past as an ideal, but now lost, and to a future full of artificial and artificialized contaminations.
It is a warning and an admonition the message that pervades 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 call of natural elements placed in the foreground, contaminated by objects of the technological world (the mouse, the CD or the alarm clock) underscore how important it is not severing the link with the past, with a world where nature predominated.
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 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 and he feels, therefore, the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, in which the journey is this eternal summons to life and to death. We must return to the starting point to rediscover ourselves, and the female figure thus 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 echo, this departure and then return. When looking to the future, we can only turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, to not be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey puts reason and emotion on the same level, arouses doubts and fears, the rhythms of daily life distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Starting out means facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Departing is still freedom, and even if this 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 hub of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and in Zenerato’s works one has this sense of origin from one place and direction 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’s temporal plane representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbling because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate resignation to losing ties with the past, and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overshadowed by technological elements.
Therefore, it becomes essential to protect oneself from this advancing future, which approaches perilously and almost uncontrollably, and to seek refuge in something familiar and ancient where even “illusions are real.”
With Gianfranco Zenerato we truly have the opportunity 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 anticipation of discovering a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, become aware of the relativity of values and of our own and others’ points of view. We may lose ourselves 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, within the backdrop of his historicizing inner cosmos, moves the movable cursor of his evolving consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjecting his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and especially the color, rich in clarity, and timbral purity, to engage with the present even in its technological aspect. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of variables of the late 20th-century post-neoclassical quotation, with Caravaggesque perspective overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has vast creative potential, creatively combining them, poetically assembling, making the strings of the soul's poetry resonate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and scanning along the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, a window opened in addition to reason. dialoguing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting his research: the figuration achieves scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted to dream, myth, or everyday 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 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 by masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles, because as Giorgio Morandi also said, “There is 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 belongs to everyone but is not for everyone; everyone therefore has the right to be moved by a masterwork, but painting and creating 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 that stem 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 one must surely include Maestro Zenerato, a particularly talented artist who makes minutiae, rigor and fantasy a painterly style that, while reminiscent of past masters, proves that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, borrowing 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 bird in the national artistic panorama.
Flower canes and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high, marble walls worn by the years and often smeared with the 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 connecting link between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always seen at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges with even greater force what Zenerato bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color increasingly vivid 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 initially poetic and then painterly, with which he manages to represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativities that our world carries.

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 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