Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

ART COLLECTORS AND ART INVESTORS OPPORTUNITIES

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

ADD AN EXCLUSIVE AND DISTINTIVE WORK TO YOUR COLLECTION THAT CAN ENHANCE THE PRESTIGE OF YOUR ART HERITAGE!

- 225 works sold
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- 90 certified reviews

www.zenerato.com

International Archiving Certificate - Authenticity certificate signed by the author
One unique hand-painted work - total dimensions including frame 40x30x6.5 cm - acrylic and metallic pigments on canvas - 2024
Ready to hang - Splendid high-quality LARSON-JUHL RUBENS wooden frame, an internationally recognized brand for refined and durable frames.

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 on the national and international art scene, built through decades of exhibiting activity.

✓ Over 500 awards and recognitions
An artistic path awarded by institutions, critics, and cultural organizations that have recognized 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, ever-new reading.

✓ Works of high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance, and color intensity make each piece visually impactful and collectible.

✓ Not mere decoration
Every work grows 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 possessing an original piece created by an artist with a long documented career, hundreds of recognitions, and a consolidated presence in international collections.

A work conceived not only to be admired today, but to maintain its artistic, cultural, and collectible 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 realm of metaphysical suspension that recalls De Chirico’s 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 overturns the perception of the everyday object, dissolving its function to confer a new ontology: the tactile surface suggests a short circuit between the sensorial dimension and the immaterial virtual one, while the energetic lines and the pulsing eye intensify 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 poses a 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 existing 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 complex bureaucratic procedures (ministerial authorizations, customs processes, etc.), additional costs are expected, already included in the shipping charges listed 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 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 public and private collections of note 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 critiques by well-known sector experts:

Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to the cohort of seventies artists, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato instead bears a poignant warning, where mankind’s defeat can also represent the threshold of secular redemption. It is a vision dense with symbolic meanings, of a modern-school painter who skillfully reconciles research with experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One notes receiving from this emblematic image 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, that diverts us from the dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this disturbing yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentialism and the harmony of shapes testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a savvy artist. Interesting and unprecedented is the blend of flowers, fruits, and contemporary technological objects. (Stefania Bison)

Gianfranco Zenerato develops narrative signs that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imaginary, organized according to the orderly sequences of his mental elaborations. His fantasized constructions could thus confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not accurate, for he does not propose an absurd and unreal imaginary, but rather paints a reality familiar to us, with a purpose that is communicative and highly symbolic. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This Gianfranco Zenerato painting is technically well-structured, finely and richly articulated, and it presents the reality constructed by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong stage-like component, and those who scrutinize these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. He indeed plays with symbols and references and enjoys misdirecting 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 a figurazione of anticipation, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to rekindle our feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author focuses on overlapping and intersecting genres, on an allusive and metaphorical research, incisive in subjects and colors. With a stunning insight, he unifies the past (still life), present (the female image), and future (symbolism, cryptic writing...) so that the work becomes an artistic and literary and metanarrative paradigm. It urges the painter 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, then, reaffirms — also thanks to brilliant chromatic tones — how the genre approach still has the right to citizenship in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato’s painting leads us to a three-tiered vision of reality. It is a journey through time that we undertake with the artist, who, through various experiments, has arrived over the years at placing his vision in a present that looks to the past as an ideal world but now lost, and a future full of artificial and artificial contaminations.

It is a warning and a notice that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The fixed element we find as a constant battery tells us “attention,” time is about to expire, 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 link with the past, with a world where nature was predominant.

The female element, placed on the present temporal plane, represents the archetype of Mother Earth set 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 in front of the complexity of a world he created, that technological one, which is slipping from his hands and therefore feels the need to return from 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 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 then return. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn a gaze to the past to not lose our roots, to not let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.

Each journey puts rationality and emotion on the same level, raises doubts and fears, and the everyday times distort and take on 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. Beginning means facing the separation from the “old self,” made of habits, roles, and certainties. Departing is still freedom, and even if this is limited because one goes toward the unknown, it manages to put the past in order. The moving perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction one is heading, while the axis of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and Zenerato’s works convey this sense of coming from a place and heading toward another. At the center, the female figure as a point of reference: 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, in some works, is dehumanized, and the female figure is almost crumbled because the artist himself does not recognize himself in such a placement: it is as if the loss of identity were a consoling resignation to the loss of connection with the past, and even the elements of still lifes sometimes become almost absent and overwhelmed by the technological ones.

It becomes fundamental, then, to protect oneself from this advancing and almost uncontrollable future, and to seek refuge in something familiar 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 dimming those mirrors while awaiting to discover a different image of ourselves. We may find our essence, realize the relativity of our own and others’ values and viewpoints. We may get lost and then rediscover ourselves, recognizing a common nature, destiny, and identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classic pastism with a language of pre-abstract figuration, within the backdrop of his inner historicizing cosmos expands the moving cursor of his emerging developmental consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjugating his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol, and above all the color, rich in clarity and timbral purity, to interact with the present including the technological. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of late 20th-century transavant-garde referencing with Caravaggesque overlaps... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has broad creative potential, poetically combining it, assembling, making the melody of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in the rhythm 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 is his research: figuration achieves scenographic effects in a space where 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 artists are not so because they promote what is new, but because they express 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: 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, as Giorgio Morandi also stated, “There is nothing or very little new under the sun,” and therefore to be original one should paint while considering social, technological, and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art belongs to everyone but not to everyone; everyone has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God has granted to only a few elect who, capable of seeing 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 grayness of the world around us.

Among these fortunate ones surely to be counted is Maestro Zenerato, a talented artist who makes minutiae, rigor, and fantasy a painting style that, although reminiscent of the old masters, proves that the artist has learned from great painting to borrow from the masters an impeccable technique, presenting a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in each single creation, which makes him a rare bird in the national artistic scene.

Vases of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high marble walls worn by the years 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 links between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always seen at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges with even greater force what Zenerato bans on the marble tablets 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, a prose writer of art, because he 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 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...