Ikaros shows the brilliance and misery of manual labor. From a craft point of view, it is rubbish, an unfinished thing. In my sculptural work, I often use discarded pieces from my commercial production. They are dirty casts full of unretouched defects, covered with putty, paint or epoxy. They bear traces of processes that are usually painstakingly smoothed to machine perfection. The result is a loss of authenticity and immediacy. I see these two phenomena as very important, because the current development of the technological possibilities of prototyping production - which sculpture, willy-nilly, also is - deepens the gap between the product and the human hand. Today, sculpture is largely a custom-made design. The inexorable economic reality of production apparently leads many artists in a hidden desire for return to conformity and tendency, dressed here in flamboyant sparseness and purity, elsewhere in affected aestheticism, possibly folkloric joviality, etc. In this regard, Ikaros is a revenge for this dictate of servile aesthetics, but also a revision of well-established conventions of the creative process.
