Gianfranco Zenerato - THE IMPROBABLE ENCOUNTER - Luminescent paint

Ideal for investment
Over 180 collectors have purchased works by Gianfranco Zenerato on Catawiki.
The top 5 rising artists on Catawiki.

Add this exclusive painting to your collection!!!

192 items sold - 100% positive - 70 reviews

www.zenerato.com

Active since 1990, with over 600 participations in national and international art events.
Recognized for the high quality of the works, with over 500 awards received.
Present in public and private collections in Italy, Europe, America, and Asia.
He exhibited alongside masters such as Antonio Nunziante, Athos Faccincani, Alfonso Borghi, Giuseppe Menozzi, Giampaolo Talani, Saturno Buttò, etc.
Reviewed by the leading Italian critics.

International Archiving Certificate - Authenticity Certificate - File containing the artist's professional record
Unique hand-painted piece - total dimensions including frame 38x48x3.5cm - acrylic, metallic pigments, luminous colors on canvas - glows in the dark - 2025
Ready to hang - Stunning baroque wooden frame of high quality, handcrafted.

In 'The Improbable Encounter,' the gentle gesture of the butterfly on the robotic hand creates an ontological paradox: the animated offering lightness to the inanimate, and the inanimate, for a moment, seeming to breathe. The work dissolves the tradition that separates life and matter, showing how the boundary between the biological and the artificial is an unstable, almost porous territory.
In the phosphorescent version, the scene distills into pure appearance: the butterfly is suspended in the ethereal, the cybernetic limb is charged with an impossible intentionality. Here, the inanimate vibrates, the animate remains silent: the paradox is fulfilled.
For a collector sensitive to thought, owning it means embracing a philosophical threshold that continues to question over time. A rare opportunity: not a painting, but an enigma that illuminates.

IMPORTANT NOTICE 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 journey 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 prominent 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 noted experts in the field of art:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to that movement of artists of the 1970s, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social rage, Zenerato, on the other hand, is the bearer of a poignant warning, where the defeat of man can also represent the antechamber of a secular redemption. It is a vision full of symbolic meaning, from a painter of the modern school, who talentedly combines research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

We realize 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 classicism of these silent images interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray world, the contemporary one, which distracts us from our dreams. (Paolo Levi)

In this disturbing yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentiality and harmonious forms testifies to the expressive tension and mastery of a skilled artist. The interplay of flowers, fruit, and contemporary technological objects is interesting and original. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops narratives of signs that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imagination, organized according to the ordered sequences of his own mental processes. His imaginative constructions might, therefore, confuse critics into calling him a surrealist. This is incorrect, as he does not propose an absurd and unreal imagination, but on the contrary, he depicts a reality familiar to us, yet with a communicative and highly symbolic purpose. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well-structured, finely and richly articulated, and presents a reality constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenographic component, and those who explore these messages are left to decipher the meaning their author has attributed to them. He plays with symbols and references and delights in confusing the interpretative coordinates of what could be the plot of a story disguised as unreality. (S. Russo)

With Gianfranco Zenerato we have an excellent idea, transformed with great skill into what is a figuration of expectation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to make us rediscover feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)


The artist focuses on the overlapping and intersection of genres, on an allusive and metaphorical exploration of subjects and colors. With a brilliant intuition, he unifies past (still life), present (the female image), and future (symbolism, cryptic writing, etc.), making the work an artistic, literary, and metanarrative paradigm. The painter is committed to identifying a new visual universe, exploring the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today—amidst all the turmoil—is still an original discipline. The artist's creativity thus reaffirms—also thanks to the vibrant colors—that a gendered approach still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato's painting leads us to a vision of reality operating on three levels. It's a journey through time that we embark on with the artist, who, through various experiments, has come over the years to situate his vision in a present that "looks" to the past as an ideal, yet now lost, world, and to a future full of artificial and contrived contaminations.
The message conveyed by the elements placed on the canvas, framing his overall vision, is a warning. The "battery," a fixed element, is telling us to be careful; time is running out. The strong reference to natural elements in the foreground, interspersed with technological objects (the mouse, the CD, or the alarm clock), underscores the importance of maintaining ties with the past, with a world where nature was predominant.
The feminine element, placed on the temporal plane of the present, represents the archetype of Mother Earth placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Like an Odysseus, Gianfranco travels this temporal dimension, seeking the forces that sustain and shape us, alter or govern our fate. Driven toward the future, the artist-man faces the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility in the face of the complexity of a world he created—the technological world—which is slipping from his grasp, and he therefore feels the need to return to where he started. Thus, the cyclical nature of the journey returns, where 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 "partire" and "partorire" both convey the concept of separation and detachment, and in every journey undertaken by Gianfranco Zenerato, there is this circular temporal reference, this departure and then return. When we look to the future, we can only turn our gaze to the past to avoid losing our roots, to avoid being dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey puts rationality and emotions on the same level, raises doubts and fears, the rhythms of everyday life become distorted and take on different meanings.
Moving toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it almost represents a loss of identity. Departing requires facing separation from the "old self," made up of habits, roles, and certainties. Departure, however, is freedom, and even if this is limited because it involves facing the unknown, it manages to restore order to the past. The shifting perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction one is going, while the fulcrum of contraction is the direction one is coming from. In Zenerato's works, one experiences this sense of coming from one place and heading for another. At the center is the female figure as a point of reference: she is the artist's conscience, the heart of the journey, with its rhythms, noises, times, difficulties, discoveries, and emotions.
The temporal plane of the future that represents the arrival is, in some works, dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in this 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 the still lifes become, in some cases, almost absent and overshadowed by the technological ones.
It becomes essential, then, to protect ourselves from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to take refuge in something known and ancient where even "illusions are real."
With Gianfranco Zenerato, we truly have the opportunity to journey through dreams, signs, and symbols, where each of us will see ourselves reflected in a mirror. Departing with him will mean temporarily darkening those mirrors, waiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We will perhaps find our essence, we will realize the relativity of our own and others' values and points of view. We will be able to lose ourselves and then find ourselves again, realizing a shared nature, a shared destiny, a shared identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical antiquity with a language of figurative pre-abstraction, sweeps the mobile cursor of his emerging consciousness of development against the backdrop of his inner, historicizing cosmos, up to the extreme emergencies of the present, subjecting his learned technique to the energy of dreams, signs, symbols, and above all, color, rich in clarity and timbral purity, to interact with the technological present as well. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive power of variables from the transavantgarde citations of the late twentieth century onwards... with Caravaggio-esque perspective overlays... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato possesses creative potential spanning a vast historical range, knowing how to combine it poetically, assembling, and making the lyre of the soul's poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and scanning the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, an open window added to reason. in dialogue with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

His research is very interesting: the figuration achieves scenographic effects in a space in which a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted at times to dreams, myths, or everyday reality, all harmonized by a splendid play of colors.


The Artist of Rigour 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 such a way that it seems as if it has never been said before.
(Goethe)


It is necessary to begin with Goethe's incisive phrase to discuss the rich and innovative painting of artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this is because that simple phrase tells a great truth, namely that everything has been done in painting and today the artist who seeks to conquer his own individuality, without being influenced by the currents and Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles. As Giorgio Morandi also argued, "There is nothing or very little that is new in the world," and therefore to be original one should paint taking into account social, technological, and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art belongs to everyone, but it is not for everyone. Everyone therefore has the right to be moved by a masterpiece. However, painting and creating is a gift that God has granted only to a select few. They are capable of seeing what others often fail to perceive, and they are able to transform the emotions that arise from small things—from a gesture, a caress, a glance—into vibrant tones that color the dullness of the world around us.
Among these fortunate ones, we must certainly include Maestro Zenerato, an artist as talented as few others, who combines meticulousness, rigor, and imagination into a pictorial style that, while reminiscent of past masters, demonstrates that the artist has treasured the lessons of fine painting, borrowing an impeccable technique from the greats. Yet, his uniqueness and individuality are evident in the touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, making him a rare exception in the national artistic panorama.
Baskets of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, arranged on high marble walls worn by the years and often defaced with the amorous drawings of two young lovers, intertwine with everyday modern objects, 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 salutes the sun and welcomes the moon, further emphasizes what Zenerato proclaims on the marble panels in the foreground, where an increasingly vivid color ranges from red to yellow, green, and all the warmest hues of the rainbow.
And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this promising young artist, a prose writer of art because he created a style that is first poetic and then pictorial, with which he manages to represent what he feels, filtering out the ugliness and negativity that our world brings with it.

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 has collaborated with the following galleries:

Gallery CD Art Studio
New Dimensione Arte Gallery
Emmediarte Gallery
La Spadarina Gallery
The Artist Gallery
Arttime Gallery
Orler Gallery