Roses

Garden 

Rose 

 Fashionable roses should be presented just as a flowers …

Plain Vegetable, look nice … without colors and … taste nothing …

 I often see roses, in vase, as a picture or part of decoration. The appeal of its 

blooms gives rise to fantasies and inspiration, and various symbolisms are created. Show your love 

with a bunch of roses has become a common creed. Its mystery has also produce various 

discussions. 

 For reasons unknown to me, I often feel melancholic when I see flowers in vase. 

My friends have often said that maybe they remind me of the fate of van Gogh’s sunflowers. I do 

tend to get overemotional when I see things like this. 

 In its presence among us, roses are often shown as symbols, as a model that functions to 

represent other things that may not be related to the rose itself. Represented as a perfect object 

geared to fit our needs as best as we could. Living roses, cheerful and vibrant among its family 

members… budding, blooming and falling among leaves, is a dynamic cycle and community that 

usually go unnoticed. A rose as a living being drowns in its community, no longer important, no 

longer a ‘super star’ pulled from its habitat. 

Plain Vegetable 

 A story about beauty, beauty that’s an ideal element to quench our visual thirst, whose 

significance has come to the fore. This significance produces an activity: design. Design makes its 

presence known, from a toilet brush to the shape of a prawn cracker. I also encounter this element 

of beauty in the shapes of vegetables, perfectly formed vegetables, ‘chubby’ and fresh but almost 

colourless, tasteless. 

 This small exhibition is part of the Schonheit vom Garten (The Beauty of Gardens) that 

showed in various places in Zurich from June to October 2011. 

Ito Joyoaatmojo
Jakarta, Januari 2012.