Gianfranco Zenerato - METAPHYSICAL MOUSE

OPPORTUNITY FOR COLLECTORS AND ART INVESTORS

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

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

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

www.zenerato.com

One-of-a-kind piece 100% HAND-PAINTED

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

✓ Over 500 awards and recognitions
An artistic journey recognized by institutions, critics and cultural organizations for 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 specialized criticism
His artistic research has been analyzed and presented by authoritative art critics and 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 realized with high technical quality
Great attention to detail, compositional balance and chromatic intensity make each piece visually and collectibly impactful.

✓ Not mere decoration
Each work stems 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 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 conceived not only to be admired today, but to retain its artistic, cultural and collectible value over time.

Piece unique 100% HAND-PAINTED
International archival certificate - Certificate of authenticity - File containing the artist’s professional path - total dimensions including frame 58x48x4.5 cm - acrylic, metallized pigments and sand on panel - 2026
Ready to be hung - Stunning baroque wooden frame prepared by hand

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

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR OFFERS OUTSIDE THE EUROPEAN UNION
Shipments to non-EU countries are possible, but due to the complex bureaucratic procedures (ministry authorizations, customs formalities, etc.), additional costs are foreseen, already included in the shipping expenses 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 embarked on an artistic journey that led him to participate in over 600 art events, receiving national and international recognitions for the quality of his works. With over 500 prizes to his name, his creations enrich notable 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 numerous reviews by renowned art experts:

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

One notices in 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 distracts us from the dream. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic essentialism and 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 sign-based narratives that reveal, step by step, the infinite possibilities of a fertile imagination, organized according to ordered sequences of his mental elaborations. His fantastical constructions could therefore confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not present an absurd and unreal imaginary world, but rather a reality familiar to us, with a purpose, however, communicative and highly symbolic. (Sandro Serradifalco)

This painting by Gianfranco Zenerato is technically well-structured, finely and richly articulated, and proposes the reality built by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong set design component, and those who scrutinize these messages are left to decipher what meaning the author has attributed to them. He indeed plays with symbols and cues and enjoys confusing 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 depiction of waiting, where modernity meets a time that no longer exists to bring us back to the feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author focuses on overlap and intersection of genres, on an allusive and metaphorical research incisive in subjects and colors. With a brilliant intuition he unifies the 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 is urged to discover a new visual universe, to probe the limits of traditional iconography to demonstrate how painting today — amid so much noise — is still an original discipline. The artist’s creativity then reaffirms — also thanks to the striking chromes — how the approach tied to the genre still has a right to citizenship in 21st-century painting.

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 faked contaminations.
It is a warning and an admonition the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” that we find as a fixed element is telling 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) underscore how important it is not to sever the link with the past, with a world in which nature was predominant.
The female element, positioned on the present temporal plane, represents the archetype of Mother-Earth placed in the middle ground between past and future.
Gianfranco, like Odysseus, travels in this temporal dimension, seeking the forces that sustain and shape us, alter or govern our fate. Pushed toward the future, the human-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, that is slipping from his hands and thus feels 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 rediscover ourselves, and the female figure thus becomes a symbol of the one who enables our rebirth.
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 circular temporal reference, this departure and return. When looking to the future, all that remains is to turn our gaze to the past to avoid losing our roots, not to let ourselves be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Every journey places rationality and emotions on the same plane, raises doubts and fears, the times of daily life become distorted and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, captured in the female gaze, but also a danger because it is almost a loss of identity. When departing, one must face 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 bring order to the past. The moving perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the flow of expansion is the direction in which one is going, while the nucleus of contraction is the direction from which one comes, and in Zenerato’s works one has this sense of origin from one place and direction toward another. At the center the female figure as a reference point: it is the artist’s conscience, the heart of 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 eroded because the artist himself does not recognize himself in that position: it is as if the loss of identity were a disconsolate resignation to the loss of ties with the past, and even the elements of still life become, in some cases, almost absent and overwhelmed by the technological ones.
It becomes essential, then, to protect oneself from this future, which advances dangerously and almost uncontrollably, and to take refuge in something familiar and ancient where even “illusions are real.”
With Gianfranco Zenerato we really 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, perhaps, our essence, become aware of the relativity of values and points of view, ours and others’. We may get lost and then find ourselves again, realizing a common nature, a common destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classical pastiche with a language of pre-abstract figurative, on the background of his inner historicizing cosmos, moves the mobile cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme urgencies of the present, subjugating his learned technique to the energy of dream, of sign, of symbol and above all of color, rich in clarity, and timbral purity, to interact with the contemporary even technological present. His modernity is genuinely psychological and an intensive expression of his expressive charge of variables of the trans-avant-garde citazionista from the late 20th century onward... with Caravaggesque perspective overlays ... and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt...). Zenerato has wide creative potential, skillfully blending poetically, assembling, making the harp 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 in addition to reason. dialoging with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting is his research: figurative reaches scenic effects in a space where a symbolic frequency vibrates, entrusted from time to time to dream, myth, or daily 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 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 discuss the rich and innovative painting of the artist Gianfranco Zenerato, and this because through that simple sentence a great truth is told, namely that in painting everything has already been done and today the artist who tries to attain his own individuality, without being influenced by currents and by the Masters of the past, must overcome enormous obstacles because, as Giorgio Morandi also said, “There is nothing or almost nothing new in the world,” and therefore to be original one would have to paint considering social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art belongs to everyone but not to everyone, everyone therefore has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God has granted only to a few chosen who, able to see what others often do not even perceive, succeed in transforming the emotions that arise from small things, from a gesture, from a caress, from a look, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.

Among these fortunate ones we must surely count Maestro Zenerato, a talented artist like few, who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy one painting style that, although recalling past Masters, proves that the artist has learned from the lessons of beautiful painting, stealing from the greats an impeccable technique, presents a uniqueness and an individuality visible in that touch of elegant modernity present in every single creation, which makes him a white crow in the national artistic panorama.

Bunches of flowers and ripe, lush fruit, laid on tall marbled 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 the link between past, present and future; the surrounding landscape, almost always captured at dusk when the green ray greets the sun and gives way to the moon, emerges with even stronger vigor, highlighting a color ever more vivid ranging from red to yellow to green, and all the warmest tones of the rainbow.

And the rainbow seems to overshadow the career of this young and promising artist, prose-maker 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 ugliness and negativity that our world carries.

People who 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...

Has 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