‘Materia viva’
adomarte Milano, 2026
ADOMARTE – Materia Viva, a group exhibition that investigates denim as a material, cultural, and symbolic space, examining its transformations and
ambivalences within the contemporary. With this exhibition, ADOM RED inaugurates its first dialogue with the visual arts, shaping a project that connects textile production, artistic research, and contemporary thought.
At the core of the exhibition, the fabric is presented as an active material: a textile rooted in labor and resistance that, over time, has evolved into one of the most widespread and shared garments of global culture. From functional workwear to a vehicle of individual and collective expression, denim traverses eras, bodies, and contexts, retaining an extraordinary capacity for adaptation.
Through this evolution, it has progressively transcended boundaries of gender, class, age, and cultural belonging, establishing itself as one of the few truly transversal materials of our time.
Materia Viva approaches denim as a matter that absorbs time, records use, and preserves traces and memories. In a historical moment marked by dematerialization, the acceleration of production cycles, and an increasing distance between object and process, the exhibition proposes a return to the relationship between body, gesture, and form, restoring centrality to the time of production, the history embedded in the textile, and the potential inherent in the material itself.
“Impronte introspettive” 2025, Tempera on Denim, 90 x 135 cmWithin the context of Italian feminism in the 1960s, jeans emerged as a garment charged with political and symbolic meaning. The fabric broke conventions associated with women’s clothing, liberating the body from normative codes and asserting a new relationship between identity and freedom. The garment thus became a tool of emancipation and self-expression, capable of making visible a female subjectivity that had long been marginalized and silenced.
In its evolutionary trajectory, jeans did not produce formal equality, but progressively revealed the female body as a site of difference.
Tessarollo’s work is situated within this feminist genealogy. The artist uses her own body as a symbolic measure of the feminine, transforming the canvas into an active manifesto of resistance and self-assertion. Here, denim is not merely a support, but a territory
traversed by history, struggle, and memory, where the feminine is defined not in opposition, but as an active subject capable of rewriting its own codes of visibility and power.
I developed a series of self-portraits that accompany a performative act of body painting, used here as a language of autonomy, embodiment, and female empowerment.
The face is deliberately obscured, allowing the image to move beyond the individual and toward a shared, universal feminine presence. By withdrawing identity, the body becomes a site of resonance rather than representation.
Acknowledging the insecurities that traverse all bodies, I choose to present these images publicly as an affirmation of confidence and sensibility. Sensuality, in this context, is not ornamental but declarative, an expression of strength, awareness, and self-possession.
This work stands in defense of shape diversity and the transformative power of the body when reclaimed as both subject and medium.