Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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 ARTISTIC HERITAGE!

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

www.zenerato.com

One-of-a-kind piece 100% HAND-PAINTED on luxurious black velvet - glows in the dark

WHY COLLECT A GIANFRANCO ZENERATO WORK

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

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

✓ Works produced with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece visually impactful and collectible.

✓ Not mere decoration
Each work arises from a research journey 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 collectible value over time.

International Storage Certificate - Certificate of authenticity - File containing the artist’s career path
One-of-a-kind work painted 100% by hand - total dimensions including frame 36x42x5 cm - acrylic and luminescent colors on luxurious black velvet - the painting glows in the dark - 2025
Ready to hang - Beautiful handcrafted high-quality wooden frame
(Modern icons series)

ICON is more than a work: it is a visual archetype, a contemporary relic that transforms the mouse - a daily object - into a sacred symbol, a totem of our time.
On the deep background of the black velvet, acrylic and luminescent colors explode like electrical impulses, signals between mind and machine.
Every gesture is a tension between instinct and control, between chaos and form, between human and digital.
The work does not describe, it evokes. It does not represent, it transmits. Here, matter becomes language and the object metamorphoses into an icon.
Buying ICON means entering into contact with a magnetic, living symbol.
It is a work that is not merely contemplated but experienced. It is not possessed, but possesses you.
Whoever chooses it makes a radical gesture: seizes a fragment of the present and transforms it into living memory.
ICON looks at you. Calls you. Welcomes you.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR BIDDERS 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 expected, 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 embarked on 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 significant 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 numerous reviews by well-known experts in the field of art:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that school of artists from the seventies, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato bears a poignant warning, where the human defeat can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school, who with talent manages to reconcile 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 classicism of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which diverts us from dreams. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentiality and harmony of forms testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a skilled artist. Interesting and original is the mixture of flowers, fruits and technological objects of contemporaneity. (Stefania Bison)

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

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato 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 scrutinize these messages are left 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 weave of a story camouflaged as unreality. (S. Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato we have an excellent idea, transformed with great ability into what is a depiction of anticipation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to rekindle feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author emphasizes overlay and intersection of genres, on a searching, incisive allusive and metaphorical approach to subjects and colors. With a stunning intuition, he unifies the past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing ...) so that the work becomes both an artistic and literary, meta-narrative paradigm. It is essential for the painter 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 reaffirmed — thanks also to the striking chromies — how the approach tied to the genre still has a place in 21st-century painting.

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 come over the years 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 artificial contaminations.
It is a warning and a notice the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “drum” that 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) emphasize how important it is not to sever the connection with the past and a world where nature was predominant.
The female element, located on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of the mother-Earth placed in the middle 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 from his hands and thus feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns where the journey is this eternal summons to life and death. We will have to 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 temporal circular reminder, this departure and then return. When looking to the future we have no choice but to turn our gaze to the past in order not to lose our roots, not to let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey puts rationality and emotions on the same level, gives rise to doubts and fears, the times of daily life distort and acquire 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. When departing, one must face 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 in which one is going, while the fulcrum 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. At the center the female figure as a reference point: it is the artist’s consciousness, the heart of going, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries and emotions.
The future temporal plane representing arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that position: 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 a technological nature.
It then becomes essential to protect oneself from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to take refuge in something familiar and ancient where even “illusions are real.”
With Gianfranco Zenerato we truly have the chance 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 in anticipation of discovering a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, realize the relativity of values and points of view, ours and others. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, a shared 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 emergencies of the present, subduing 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 its technological form. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intense expression of his expressive charge of variables of the postmodern transavant-garde citational of late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspective overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has wide creative potential, skillfully combining it poetically, assembling, making the lyre of the poetry of the soul vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in progression on the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, a window opened added to reason, conversing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting his research: the figurative achieves scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, myth, or daily 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 seems it has never been said before. (Goethe)

It is necessary to start from Goethe’s incisive phrase to talk about the rich and innovative painting of artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is 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 stated, “There is little or nothing new in the world,” and therefore to be original one should paint bearing in mind 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 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 spring from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a gaze, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones one must surely count Maestro Zenerato, a talented artist who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, though recalling past Masters, shows that the artist has absorbed the lessons of fine painting and borrows a flawless technique, presenting a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a rare bird in the national artistic panorama.
Roses of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high walls of marble worn by the years and often smeared by 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 the linking ring between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk when the green ray salutes the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges even more forcefully the color that Zenerato imposes on the marble panels in the foreground, where an ever more vivid color range spans from red, yellow, green, and all the warmer tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to dominate the career of this young and promising artist, a proser 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.
Those 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