Why are there no statues in Orthodox churches, only icons?

The Orthodox nuance

Remember why the Old Testament forbade carved images: idols had exactly this form, statues of bronze or wood, set up in temples, fed, clothed, which people worshiped as gods. When the Church defended icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council, it defended a specific form of representation — painted, flat, symbolic — precisely so as not to slide back toward that old form of idolatry.

And it's not just about avoiding confusion. The icon has its own very deliberate language. Notice how the lines of a good icon often converge toward you, they do not fade into the distance as in an ordinary painting — this is called reverse perspective, and it says something simple: the saint in the icon is not only looked at by you, he looks at you, from eternity. The background is almost always golden, not because the sky is yellow, but because gold represents the uncreated light, the grace that bathes everything that has been sanctified. Faces are thinned, elongated, almost without strong shadows, because the one who is glorified no longer needs an outward light falling on his cheek — he carries the light within himself.

A realistic statue, with deep shadows, full volume, flesh modeled as on a living man, instinctively pulls the gaze back toward the fallen body, toward this world as it is now. That is why Western art, especially from the Renaissance onward, moved toward an almost sensual realism of the saints, often very beautiful, but theologically something else — an insistence on the emotion and the body of here, not on the transfiguration of the beyond. Orthodoxy has kept the painted form almost everywhere, precisely as a safeguard, not for lack of craftsmen who knew how to carve.