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 won the trust of over 180 international collectors.

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

- 220 works sold
- 100% positive feedback
- 87 certified reviews

www.zenerato.com

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

WHY COLLECT A WORK BY GIANFRANCO ZENERATO

✓ 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 that have acknowledged 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 the specialized press
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 instantly recognizable style
Zenerato’s works unite figurative tradition, symbolism and contemporaneity. Each painting tells a story and invites the viewer to a personal and always new reading.

✓ Works executed with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece a work with strong visual and collectible 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 author’s artistic 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 awards and a consolidated presence in international collections.

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

International Archive Certificate - Certificate of authenticity - Dossier containing the artist’s professional journey
One-of-a-kind piece painted 100% by hand - total dimensions including frame 39x44x3 cm - acrylic and metallic pigments - 2025
Ready to hang - Splendid high-quality handcrafted Baroque wooden frame

ICON is more than a work: it is a visual archetype, a contemporary relic that transforms the mouse - an everyday object - into a sacred symbol, a totem of our time.
At the deep background of black velvet, the acrylic and luminescent colors explode like electric impulses, signals between mind and machine.
Every gesture is 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 transfigures into an icon.
Buying ICON means entering into contact with a magnetic and living symbol.
It is a work not to be contemplated but to be experienced. It is not owned, but it owns you.
Whomever chooses it makes a radical gesture: seizes a fragment of the present and turns it into living memory.
ICON looks at you. It calls you. It welcomes you.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR BIDDERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipping to non-EU countries is possible, but due to complex bureaucratic procedures (ministry 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 normal.
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 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 artists of the seventies, stern messengers to Western society. While the Milanese Antonio Recalcati and the Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato carries a poignant warning, where the defeat of man can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter of the 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 meditation on the beauty of a still life, of a flower and of a young woman. The classicism of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which distracts us from dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this as unsettling as explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentialism and the harmony of forms testifies to the expressive tension and the mastery of a skilled artist. Interesting and new the blend of flowers, fruits, and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato elaborates sign- 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, therefore, confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, because he does not propose an absurd and unreal imaginary, 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 plot of a story camouflaged as unreality. (S. Russo)

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

The author focuses on overlapping and intersecting genres, on an allusive and incisive metaphorical research in subjects and colors. With a brilliant intuition, he unifies the past (still life), the present (the female image), and the future (symbolism, 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 demonstrate how painting today — amid so much noise — is still an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reaffirm — thanks also to the dazzling chromies — how the approach tied to the genre still has citizenship 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 positioned his vision in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal world, but long gone, and a future full of artificial and artificed contaminations.
It is a warning and a caution the message that shines from the elements placed on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” we find as a fixed element tells us to “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 dominant.
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 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 he thus feels the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns in which the journey is this eternal call to life and death. We must return to the starting point to rediscover ourselves, and the female figure thus becomes a symbol of she 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 departure and return. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn the gaze to the past in order not to lose our roots, to avoid being dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey places rationality and emotions on the same level, arouses doubts and fears, the times of daily life distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the gaze of the feminine, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Starting requires facing the separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. To depart 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 heading, while the hub 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 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 crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in such a position: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate resignation to losing the tie with the past and even the elements of still life become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by the technological ones.
Thus it becomes essential to protect oneself from this dangerous and almost uncontrolled 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 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, 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, a common destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastiche with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historicizing cosmos, spans the movable 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 especially color, rich in brightness and timbral purity, to interact with the contemporary, even technological, present. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of variables of late 20th-century postmodern reference, with Caravaggesque perspective overlaps... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has creative potential of broad historical scope, poetically combining them, assembling, making the lyre of the poetry of the soul vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in the scan 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 from time to time to dream, to myth, or to everyday reality, all harmonized by a splendid chromatic game.

The Artist of rigor and modernity
Curated 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 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 past currents and Masters, must overcome enormous obstacles because as Giorgio Morandi also claimed, “There is little of nothing 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, therefore, has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but to paint and create is a gift that God has granted only to a few who, able to see what others often do not perceive, manage to transform the emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a glance, into vibrant tones that color the dullness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate ones one must surely count the Master Zenerato, a gifted artist who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy a painting style that, although it recalls past Masters, shows that the artist has learned from the lessons of beautiful painting, borrowing an impeccable technique from the greats, presenting a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, which makes him a rare exception in the national artistic panorama.
Vines of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, resting on tall walls of marble worn by the years and often splashed with the amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern everyday 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 vigor what Zenerato bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color ever more vivid ranges 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, prose writer 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.

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