Gianfranco Zenerato - ICON

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Among the most highly regarded and fastest-growing contemporary artists on Catawiki, Gianfranco Zenerato has already won the trust of over 180 international collectors.

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- 228 works sold
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One-of-a-kind, 100% HAND-PAINTED
(Painting created with luminescent colors)

WHY COLLECT A WORK BY GIANFRANCO ZENERATO

✓ Over 35 years of professional career
Active since 1990, Gianfranco Zenerato has developed a personal artistic language over time, one that is recognizable and appreciated by collectors and art critics.

✓ More than 600 exhibitions and art events
A constant presence in the national and international art scene, built through decades of exhibiting.

✓ Over 500 awards and recognitions
An artistic career recognized by institutions, critics, and cultural organizations, which have acknowledged its value and quality.

✓ Works held in private and public collections
His paintings are part of collections in Italy, Europe, America, and Asia, confirming the international interest in his work.

✓ Acclaimed by art critics
His artistic research has been analyzed and presented by leading 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 bring together figurative tradition, symbolism, and contemporary art. Each painting tells a story and invites the viewer to interpret it personally and in a new way each time.

✓ Works created to a high technical standard
Great attention to detail, compositional balance, and chromatic intensity make each work a piece with strong visual and collectible appeal.

✓ More than mere decoration
Each work stems from an artistic inquiry 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 work by Gianfranco Zenerato means owning an original piece created by an artist with a long, documented career, hundreds of awards, and an established presence in international collections.

A work conceived not only to be admired today, but to retain its artistic, cultural, and collectible value over time

“ICON” is a visual meditation on the sacredness of technology. An everyday object, a mouse, is elevated to the status of a relic of digital thought, the center of a chromatic energy that vibrates like an aura. The painted surface becomes the language of the information flow, translating mechanical action into inner perception. The artist transforms functionality into a symbol, offering the present an image of worship: the icon of our connected age.
Owning ICON means preserving a fragment of the most authentic contemporary world: a work that brings together aesthetics, reflection, and technological memory. A painting destined to become a testament to our transition from analog to digital humanity.

International archive registration certificate - Certificate of authenticity - Dossier containing the artist's professional career
One-of-a-kind, 100% HAND-PAINTED - overall dimensions including frame 33.5x33.5x6.5cm - acrylic, metallic pigments, and luminescent paints - 2026
Ready to hang - Beautiful wooden frame included in the lot (as shown in the photo).

GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has pursued an artistic career that has led him to take part in over 600 art events, receiving national and international recognition 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...

He currently works with the well-known art critic, Prof. Giammarco Puntelli.

SOME CRITICAL APPRAISALS BY WELL-KNOWN ART EXPERTS:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that movement of artists of the seventies, stern messengers addressing Western society. While the Milanese artist Antonio Recalcati and the Roman artist Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato, by contrast, conveys a poignant warning, in which man's defeat may also represent the threshold of a secular redemption. This is a vision dense with symbolic meaning, by a painter of the modern school who, with talent, knows how to reconcile research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One realizes that this emblematic image offers a kind of invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, a flower, and a young woman. The classical nature of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world—that of the contemporary age—which distracts us from our dreams. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic simplicity and harmony of form testifies to the expressive tension and mastery of a knowledgeable artist. The combination of flowers, fruit, and contemporary technological objects is interesting and unprecedented. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato creates sign-based narratives that gradually reveal the endless possibilities of a fertile imagination, organized according to ordered sequences of his own mental elaborations. His imaginative constructions could therefore lead one to classify him as a surrealist. This is not accurate, however, since he does not offer us an absurd and unreal imaginary world, but instead paints a reality familiar to us, with a communicative and highly symbolic purpose. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well constructed, finely and richly articulated, and presents a reality built by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong theatrical component, and those who delve into these messages are left to decipher the meaning their creator has assigned to them. He plays with symbols and allusions, taking pleasure in confusing the interpretive clues to what may be the plot of a story disguised as unreality. (S. Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato, we have an excellent idea, transformed with great skill into a vision of expectation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists, allowing us to encounter our feelings once more... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The artist relies on the superimposition and intersection of genres, on an allusive and metaphorical approach that is incisive in its subjects and colors. With a flash of intuition, he unites the past (still life), the present (the female image), and the future (symbolism, cryptic writing...), so that the work becomes an artistic, literary, and metanarrative paradigm. The painter is driven to identify a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography and demonstrate that painting today—amid so much clamor—remains an original discipline. The artist's creativity thus reaffirms—also thanks to its flamboyant colors—that genre-based approaches still have a place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato's painting leads us to a vision of reality operating on three levels. The journey we are about to undertake with the artist is a journey through time: through various experiments, over the years he has come to situate his vision in a present that “looks” to the past as an ideal world, now lost, and to a future full of artificial and contrived influences.
The message that emerges from the elements placed on the canvas around his overall vision is a warning. The “battery” that appears as a constant element is telling us “pay attention”: time is running out. The strong appeal of natural elements in the foreground, contaminated by objects from the technological world (the mouse, the CD, or the alarm clock), underscores how important it is not to sever our ties with the past, with a world in which nature was predominant.
The female figure, situated in the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of Mother Earth, placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Like Odysseus, Gianfranco travels through this temporal dimension in search of the forces that sustain and shape us, alter or govern our fate. Driven toward the future, the artist-man embarks on the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility in the face of the complexity of a world he has created—the technological world—which is slipping out of his control. He therefore feels the need to return to where he began. Thus, the cycle returns, with the journey as an eternal call to life and death. We must return to the starting point to find ourselves again, and the female figure therefore becomes the symbol of the one who enables us to be reborn.
The words “to depart” and “to give birth” both contain the idea of separation and parting, and every journey undertaken by Gianfranco Zenerato carries this circular temporal reference, this setting out and then returning. When we look to the future, all we can do is turn our gaze to the past so as not to lose our roots, so as not to let the technological and post-technological world dehumanize us.
Every journey places reason and emotion on the same level, raises doubts and fears, and distorts the rhythms of everyday life, giving them different meanings.
Moving toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it almost means losing one's identity. In setting out, one must face separation from one's “old self,” with its habits, roles, and certainties. Setting out is nonetheless freedom, and even though that freedom is limited because one is heading into the unknown, it can bring order to the past. The moving perspective becomes both centrifugal and centripetal: the flow of expansion is the direction in which one is heading, while the focal point of contraction is the direction from which one came. In Zenerato's works, one senses both a point of origin and a direction toward another place. At the center, the female figure serves as a point of reference: she is the artist's conscience, the heart of the journey, with its rhythms, sounds, times, difficulties, discoveries, and emotions.
The temporal plane of the future, representing arrival, is dehumanized in some works, and the female figure is almost crumbling because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that setting. It is as if the loss of identity were a resigned acceptance of the loss of connection with the past, and even the still-life elements sometimes become almost absent, overshadowed by technological ones.
It then becomes essential to protect oneself from this future, which advances perilously and almost uncontrollably, and to take 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. Setting out with him will mean temporarily darkening those mirrors as we wait to discover a different image of ourselves. Perhaps we will find our essence and realize the relativity of our own and others' values and points of view. We may lose our way and then find ourselves again, realizing that we share a nature, a destiny, and an identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

Starting from classical traditionalism and using a language of pre-abstract figuration, against the backdrop of his inner, historicizing cosmos, the artist moves the mobile cursor of his emerging developmental consciousness across the full range of possibilities, reaching the furthest extremes of the present. He subordinates his learned technique to the energy of dreams, signs, symbols, and above all color, rich in clarity and tonal purity, in order to engage with the present, including its technology. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of the variables of the citationist Transavanguardia from the end of the twentieth century onward... with Caravaggesque perspectival overlays... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance origin (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has wide-ranging creative potential across art history, and knows how to combine it poetically, assembling and making the lyre of the soul's poetry vibrate along the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in step with the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, an open window combined with reason, in dialogue with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

His research is very interesting: figuration achieves theatrical effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted in turn to dreams, myth, or everyday reality, all harmonized by a splendid play of colors.

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 express what they have to say in such a way that it seems it has never been said before.
(Goethe)

We must begin with Goethe's incisive statement to discuss the rich and innovative painting of the artist Gianfranco Zenerato. This is because that simple sentence expresses a great truth: everything has already been done in painting, and today an artist seeking to establish an individual identity without being influenced by movements and masters of the past must overcome enormous obstacles. As Giorgio Morandi also maintained, “There is nothing, or very little, new in the world”; therefore, to be original, one would need to paint with social, technological, and scientific developments in mind.

They say art is for everyone, but not by everyone. Everyone therefore has the right to be moved in the presence of a masterpiece, but painting and creating are gifts God has granted only to a select few who, able to see what others often fail even to perceive, can transform the emotions stirred by small things—a gesture, a caress, a glance—into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate people, we must certainly count Maestro Zenerato, an exceptionally talented artist who makes precision, rigor, and imagination the foundation of a pictorial style that, while bringing past masters to mind and demonstrating that the artist has learned from the lessons of fine painting, borrowing impeccable technique from the great masters, displays a uniqueness and individuality evident in the touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a rare exception in the national art scene.
Baskets of flowers and ripe, abundant fruit, resting on high marble walls worn by the years and often marked with love notes by two young lovers, intertwine with objects of modern everyday life, such as a CD-ROM, a mouse, or a spatula, which become the link between past, present, and future. The surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk, when the green ray bids farewell to the sun and welcomes the moon, brings out even more powerfully what Zenerato sets out on the marble surfaces in the foreground, where ever more vivid colors stand out, ranging from red, yellow, and green to all the warmest shades of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to shine over the career of this young and promising artist, a prose writer of art because he is the creator of a style that is first poetic and then pictorial, through which he manages to depict what he feels, filtering out the ugliness and negativity our world carries with it.

The following have written about him or assessed 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 worked 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