Gianfranco Zenerato - I AM NOT A MOUSE

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Gianfranco Zenerato (Professional Artist - Italy)

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

International Archival Certificate - Certificate of Authenticity - File containing the artist's professional journey
Unique hand-painted piece - total dimensions including frame 38x33.5x5 cm - acrylic, metallized pigments, luminescent colors - 2026
Ready to hang - Beautiful high-quality wooden Baroque frame handcrafted

I AM NOT A MOUSE
The work asserts an identity negation: the object declares it does not coincide with its function. The mouse, icon of the interface, is removed from the operational flow and transformed into a mute, almost liturgical presence, marked by engravings that evoke an indecipherable writing.
The underlying geometric surface is not space but a fragment of a system: a post-use environment where technology survives as a trace. The frame, redundant and ornamental, institutionalizes the device, keeps it from consumption, and consecrates it as a conceptual relic.
Here identity is not given by utility but by subtraction. "I am not a mouse" becomes an ontological statement: what was an interface becomes a riddle.

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GIANFRANCO ZENERATO (Professional Artist - Italy)

Active since 1990, he has undertaken an artistic path that led him to participate in over 600 art events, receiving national and international accolades 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 notable art experts:
Gianfranco Zenerato belongs to a cohort of seventies-era artists, stern messengers to Western society. While Milanese Antonio Recalcati and Roman Franco Mulas expressed social anger, Zenerato conveys a poignant warning, where mankind's defeat may herald a secular redemption. It is a symbol-rich, modern-school painter who skillfully reconciles research and experimentation. (Paolo Levi)

One senses in this emblematic image an invitation to meditate on the beauty of a still life, a flower, and a young woman. The classic stillness interrupts the suspended atmosphere of a gray contemporary world that distracts us from dreaming. (Paolo Levi)

In this unsettling yet explicit visual message, the dialogue between chromatic simplicity and the harmony of forms testifies to expressive tension and the mastery of a seasoned artist. Interesting and original is the blend of flowers, fruit 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 the orderly sequences of his own mental elaborations. His fantastical constructions could thus confuse critical judgment in defining him as a surrealist. This is not correct, as he does not propose an absurd 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-constructed, finely and richly articulated, and proposes reality built by the mind of a visionary. His works have a strong scenographic component, and observers must decipher what meaning the author attributed to them. Indeed, he plays with symbols and allusions and enjoys confusing interpretive coordinates of what could be the plot of a story camouflaged in 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 is no longer there to make us rediscover feelings... (Giammarco Puntelli)

The author focuses on overlap and intersection of genres, on an incisive, evocative, metaphorical search in subjects and colors. With a radiant intuition, he unifies the past (still life), present (the female image) and future (symbolism, cryptic writing, etc.) so that the work becomes an artistic and literary and meta-narrative paradigm. The painter should identify a new visual universe, explore 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 vivid chromatics — that the genre’s approach still has a rightful place in 21st-century painting.

Gianfranco Zenerato's painting leads us to a three-level view of reality. It is a journey through time that the artist accompanies us on, having, through various experiments, positioned 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 artificial contaminations. It is a warning and a caution the message that emerges from the elements on the canvas surrounding his overall vision. The “battery” we find as a fixed element tells us “attention,” time is running out, and the strong call of natural elements 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 bond with the past, with a world where nature dominated.
The female element, placed on the present temporal plane, represents the mother-Earth archetype 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. Driven toward the future, the artist-traveler faces the journey with strength and determination, but then realizes his own fragility in front of the complexity of a world he created, the technological one, which is slipping away from him, and thus feels the need to return to where he started. Hence the cyclicity in which 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 Gianfranco Zenerato undertakes there is this circular temporal echo, this departure and return. When looking to the future, we can only turn our gaze to the past to not lose our roots, not allow ourselves to be dehumanized by the technological and post-technological world.
Each journey puts reason and emotion on the same level, raises doubts and fears, daily times distort and take on different meanings.
Going toward the future becomes a challenge, caught in the feminine 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 freedom is limited because one faces the unknown, it can restore order to the past. The moving perspective becomes centrifugal and centripetal; the expansion flow is the direction one is going, while the contraction center is the direction from which one comes. In Zenerato’s works one has this sense of coming from somewhere and moving toward another. In 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 time plane representing 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 connection with the past, and even elements of still lifes sometimes become almost absent and overwhelmed by technological ones.
Then it becomes essential to protect oneself from this advancing and almost uncontrollable future, and to seek refuge in something known 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 our own reflection in a mirror. Departing with him will mean momentarily obscuring those mirrors in anticipation of discovering 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, realizing a common nature, a common destiny, a common identity. (Gaetana Foletto)

The artist, starting from classic pastism with a language of pre-abstract figurative, within the inner historicizing cosmos expands the movable cursor of his developing consciousness, up to the extreme emergencies of the present, subjugating his learned technique to the energy of dream, sign, symbol and especially the color, rich in brightness and timbral purity, to interact with the present even technologically. His modernity is genuinely psychological and expressive of his explosive charge of variables of the late 20th-century transavanguardia citazionista… with Caravaggesque perspectival overlays … and modern psychology of post-Renaissance extraction (Rembrandt …). Zenerato has vast creative potential historically, poetically combining them, assembling, making the strings of the soul’s poetry vibrate on the coordinates of art history in universal values, and in scanning the cursor of his infinite imaginative evolution, through the hyperrealism of his visionary dream, a window opened added to reason, dialoguing with the present. (Prof. Alfredo Pasolino)

Very interesting is his research: figurative reaches scenic 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 authors 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 speak of the rich and innovative painting of Gianfranco Zenerato, and this because through that simple phrase one tells a great truth, namely that 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 said, “There is almost nothing new in the world,” and so to be original one should paint with awareness of social, technological and scientific evolutions.

It is said that art is for everyone but not for everyone; everyone has the right to be moved by a masterpiece, but painting and creation is a gift that God has granted only to 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 gaze, into vibrant tones that color the grayness of the world around us.
Among these lucky ones one must certainly count the Master Zenerato, a talented artist like few, who makes meticulousness, rigor and fantasy one pictorial style that, while recalling past Masters, proves that the artist has absorbed the lessons of beautiful 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 species in the national artistic panorama.
Flower canopies and ripe, lush fruit, laid on high marble walls worn by the years and often stained by 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 greets the sun and welcomes the moon, emerges with even more vigor what Zenerato bans on the marble tablets in the foreground, where a color increasingly vivid ranges 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, a prose writer of art who creates a style that is first poetic and then pictorial, able to represent what he feels by filtering the ugliness and negativity 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