Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ART COLLECTORS AND INVESTORS

Among the most appreciated contemporary artists and fastest growing on Catawiki, Gianfranco Zenerato has already earned the trust of over 180 international collectors.

ADD AN EXCLUSIVE AND DISTINGUISHED WORK TO YOUR COLLECTION, ABLE TO ENHANCE THE PRESTIGE OF YOUR ART HERITAGE!

- 225 works sold
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International archival certificate - Authenticity certificate signed by the author
A unique hand-painted work - overall dimensions including frame 40x30x6.5 cm - acrylic and metallic pigments on canvas - 2024
Ready to hang - Beautiful high-quality LARSON-JUHL RUBENS wooden frame, an internationally recognized brand for refined and durable frames.

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 exhibiting activity.

✓ Over 500 awards and recognitions
An artistic path recognized 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.

✓ Appreciated by specialized criticism
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 combine 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 color intensity make each piece a work with strong visual and collectible impact.

✓ Not just simple 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 visionary perspective.

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

Metaphysical Mouse: Ontology of an Hybridization

"Metaphysical Mouse" is configured as a painting inquiry into the metamorphosis of the technological object, placed in a dimension of metaphysical suspension that recalls the dechirichian heritage. The iconography of the mouse, emblematic tool of the digital era, is transfigured into a hybrid entity, at once organic and mechanical, evoking a process of osmosis between human and artificial.

The work subverts the perception of the everyday object, dissolving its function to confer a new ontology: the tactile surface suggests a short circuit between the sensible dimension and that of the virtual immaterial, while the energetic lines and the pulsating eye amplify its symbolic charge. The use of chiaroscuro and spatial ambiguity generate a sense of estrangement that places the subject in an indefinite temporality, a limbo between past and future.

Through this transfiguration, the work invites reflection on the autonomy of the technological device in the post-digital era: the mouse is no longer a simple extension of human will, but an entity with its own presence, a post-human creature that exists beyond its function. "Metaphysical Mouse" thus presents as a conceptual threshold, an image that interrogates our relationship with technology in terms of agency, identity and transcendence.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR OFFERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipments to non-EU countries are possible, but due to the 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.
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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 significant public and private collections in Italy, Europe, America and Asia. He has exhibited beside 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 criticisms by well-known sector experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that current of artists of the seventies, severe messengers towards Western society. While the Milanese Antonio Recalcati and the Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato, on the contrary, is a bearer of a poignant warning, where the defeat of man can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision rich in symbolic meanings, of a painterly school, who with talent reconciles research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One perceives from this emblematic image a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, of a flower and a young woman. The classicism of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, that diverts us from dreaming. (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 original is the mixture of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops symbol-driven narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imagination, 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 correct, as he does not present us with an absurd or unreal imagination, but rather paints a reality familiar to us, with a purely communicative and highly symbolic purpose. (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 study these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. He indeed plays with symbols and references and enjoys confusing interpretive coordinates of what could be the plot of a story camouflaged in unreality. (S. Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato we have an excellent idea, transformed with great capacity into what is a figure of expectancy, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to make us meet feelings again... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author emphasizes overlapping and intersection of genres, on a research that is allusive and metaphorical, incisive in subjects and colors. With a bright intuition he unifies past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing ...) so that the work becomes an artistic but also literary and meta-narrative paradigm. It urges the painter to identify a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amidst so much noise — is still an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reiterates — also thanks to the brilliant chromatic ranges — how the approach linked 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 placed his vision in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal world, but now lost, and to a future full of artificial and pretended contaminations. It is a warning and a notice the message that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas outlining his overall vision. The “battery” that we find as a fixed element tells 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-ROM or the alarm clock) emphasize how important it is not to sever the link with the past, with a world in which nature was predominant.
The female element, placed on the temporal plane of the present, represents the mother-Earth archetype placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like an Odysseus, travels in this temporal dimension, in search of the forces that support 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, therefore, 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 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 reference, this departure and return. When looking to the future, we must turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, to not let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey puts rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, the times 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 nevertheless freedom and even if this is limited because it leads to 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 focal point 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. At the center the female figure as a point of reference: it is the artist’s consciousness, the heart of the going, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries and emotions.
The future temporal plane that represents arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a desolate resignation to losing connection with the past and even the elements of still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by those technological ones.
It becomes fundamental, then, to protect oneself from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to seek 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 ourselves reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily shading those mirrors while waiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, we will realize the relativity of values and 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 classic pastiche with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the backdrop of his inner historizing cosmos widens the movable cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subordinating his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and especially that of color, rich in clarity and timbral purity, to engage with the present even technologically. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intense expression of his expressive charge of variables of postmodern transavant-garde citazionista from the late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspective overlaps ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt ...). Zenerato has vast historical creative potential, know how to poetically combine it, assembling, making the lyre of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in scan on 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: figure reaches scenic effects in a space in which a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted 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 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 the artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is because through that simple sentence a great truth is told, namely that in painting almost 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 argued, “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 is for everyone but not for everyone, everyone therefore has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creating is a gift that God has given only to a few chosen who, able to see what others often do not perceive, manage to transform emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a look, into vibrant tones that color the dreariness of the world around us.
Among these luckiest one must certainly count Master Zenerato, a talented artist as few, who makes minutiae, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, although it recalls past Masters, demonstrates that the artist has mined the lessons of fine painting, stealing from the greats an impeccable technique, presents a uniqueness and an identifiable individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a white crow in the national artistic landscape.
Bunches of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on tall walls of marble worn by the years and often stained by the amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern quotidian life, such as a CD-ROM, a mouse, a spatula, which become links between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and welcomes the moon, further intensifies what Zenerato banishes on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color increasingly vivid ranges from red, to yellow, to green, and to all the warmest 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 at first poetic and then pictorial, with which he manages to represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativities that our world carries.
They 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...