On 31 January, the daily Tribune de Genève announced that four of Geneva’s best-known characters had suddenly been orphaned by the death of their maker, John Aldus, at the age of 81. These figures – a pair of art collectors, a poet and a pretty young woman, name unknown – were not actual Genevois but life-size, hyper-realist bronze sculptures of them, mingling with other burghers in the city’s Plainpalais Square. Placed there in 1982, they were collectively titled Alter Ego – Aldus was one such himself, the artist having for five decades been known by his birth name, Gérald John Ducimetière.
