Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ART COLLECTORS AND INVESTORS

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

ADD A UNIQUE AND DISTINCTIVE WORK TO YOUR COLLECTION, CAPABLE OF ENHANCING THE PRESTIGE OF YOUR ART PATRIMONIO!

- 225 works sold
- 100% positive feedback
- 90 certified reviews

www.zenerato.com

A unique piece 100% HAND PAINTED

WHY COLLECT A WORK BY GIANFRANCO ZENERATO

✓ Over 35 years of professional career
Active since 1990, Gianfranco Zenerato has progressively developed 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 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 created with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece visually striking and collectible.

✓ 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 artist’s vision.

An opportunity for the collector

Acquiring a Gianfranco Zenerato work means possessing 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.

Piece unique 100% HAND PAINTED
International Archiving Certificate - Certificate of authenticity - File containing the artist’s professional path - total dimensions including frame 58x48x4.5 cm - acrylic, metallic pigments and sand on panel - 2026
Ready to hang - Splendid baroque wooden frame, high quality, crafted by hand

METAPHYSICAL MOUSE
In “Metaphysical Mouse” the everyday object is stripped of its function and delivered to thought. The mouse is no longer a peripheral device but a presence: a compact, almost animal, body that observes and holds silence.
The numbers and the engraved sign act as coordinates of an invisible code, suggesting that behind the interface lies a mental territory. Controlled light and sparse space isolate the form, transforming it into an emblem of an era in which the boundary between organic and artificial has already been surpassed.
It does not represent technology: it interrogates it.
Owning it means guarding a clear symbol of our contemporary condition.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR BIDDERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipping to non-EU countries is possible, but due to complex bureaucratic procedures (ministerial authorizations, customs paperwork, etc.), additional costs are anticipated, already included in the shipping costs listed in the listing.
For the same reasons, delivery times may be longer than normal.
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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has embarked on 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 notable 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 of the numerous reviews by well-known experts in the art world:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that movement of seventies artists, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato instead carries a poignant warning, where humanity’s defeat can also mark the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a painter from a modern school who with talent harmonizes research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One notices in this emblematic image a kind of invitation to meditation 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 essentialism and the harmony of forms testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a skilled artist. Interesting and original is the blend of flowers, fruits and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

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

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well structured, finely and richly articulated, and proposes a reality built by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenic component, and those who explore 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 skill into a depiction of expectation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to rekindle our emotions... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author relies on overlapping and intersecting genres, on an incisive allusive and metaphorical research into subjects and colors. With a stunning insight, 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 metanarrative paradigm. The painter’s task is to discover a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid much noise — remains an original discipline. The artist’s creativity thus reaffirms — also thanks to the brilliant chromatic tones — how the genre-based approach still has a right to citizenship 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 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 artificious contaminations. It is a warning and a caution the message reveals on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The fixed “battery” element says to us, “pay attention,” time is running out, and the strong call of natural elements in the foreground, contaminated by objects from the technological world (the mouse, the CD or the alarm clock) underscore how important it is not to sever the link with the past, with a world where nature was predominant.
The female element, positioned on the temporal plane of the present, represents the Mother-Earth archetype placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like Ulysses, travels in this temporal dimension, seeking 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 from his grasp and feels, therefore, the need to return to where he started. Thus the cyclicity returns, where the journey is this eternal call to life and death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves, and the female figure thus becomes the symbol of the one who allows us to be reborn.
The words “leave” and “bear” both contain the concept of separation and detachment, and in every journey undertaken by Gianfranco Zenerato there is this circular temporal allusion, this departure and return. When looking to the future we have no option but to look to the past to not lose our roots, to not let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey puts reason and emotion on the same level, gives rise to doubts and fears, the rhythms of daily life distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, seen in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. Departing means facing separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles and certainties. Leaving is still freedom, and even if this is limited because we go toward the unknown, it manages to bring order to the past. The moving perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction we are moving toward, while the hub of contraction is the direction from which we come. In Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from a 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’s 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 sorrowful resignation to the loss of the bond with the past, and even the elements of still life become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by technological ones.
It becomes essential, 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 our own reflection in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily darkening those mirrors while waiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, realize the relativity of values and of our own and others’ points of view. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, becoming aware of a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative art, within the backdrop of his internal historicizing cosmos sweeps the movable cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme emergencies of the present, submitting 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 a technological sense. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of postmodernist, captionist transavant-garde from the late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspective overlaps ... and modern post-Renaissance-inspired psychology (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has vast creative potential, poetically combining it, assembling, making the lyre of the soul’s poetry vibrate 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 together with reason. conversing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting his research: figurative art achieves scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted to dream, myth, or everyday 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 express what they have to say in a way that makes it seem 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 is because through that simple sentence a great truth is told: 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 considering social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art is for everyone but not for everyone; everyone has the right to be moved before a masterpiece, but painting and creating is a gift that God has granted only to a few elect 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 look, into vibrant tones that color the grays of the world around us.
Among these fortunate ones certainly to be included is Master Zenerato, a talent like few, who makes meticulousness, rigor and imagination a painting style that, while recalling past Masters, proves that the artist has learned 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 every single creation, making him a rare bird in the national artistic panorama.
Vases of flowers and ripe, lush fruit resting on high marble walls worn by time and often stained 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 the 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, brings out even more strongly what Zenerato bans on the marble boards in the foreground, where a color ever more vivid ranges from red, to yellow, to green, and to all the warm tones of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this young and promising artist, a prose writer of art who creates a style that is 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.

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