The artist

My name is Aël. We’ve always portrayed our gods and our great figures at their very best: the noble gesture, the faraway gaze, the flawless marble. These statues say less about who they were than about who we wanted to be.

GLiTCH starts from that gap, which I find endlessly amusing. Each work keeps the pose, the drapery and the dignity of its model. Only one thing changes: an object from our everyday lives. It’s often enough to show where we’ve got to.

I don’t look down on this world. I’m part of it, with my screens, my stockpiles and my own contradictions. The museum that exhibits these works doesn’t exist yet. It does what museums do: it takes everything seriously. In one room, it falls silent.

My dream is for it to exist for real. If this project finds its audience, everything it earns will go back into bringing the statues out of the screen: small pieces in real materials first, then, one day, all thirteen works at full size, in real galleries, with their labels, their rope barrier and their night warden.

It would be, I think, the finest thing I will ever have done. And I would still laugh at it, because none of it would be entirely made up.