Sonnet 5 compares nature's four seasons with the young man's life stages. Although the seasons are cyclical, his life is linear, and hours become tyrants that oppress him because he cannot escape time's

grasp. Time might "frame / The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell," meaning that everyone notices the youth's beauty, but time's"neverresting"Progress ensures that this beauty will eventually fade.

In an extended metaphor, the poet argues that because flowers provide perfume to console people during the winter, it is natural for the youth to have a child to console him during his old age. Without

perfume from summer flowers, people would not remember previous summers during the long, brutal winters; childless, the young man will grow old alone and have nothing to remind him of his younger days.

Shakespeare didn’t realise that his children were his words, and the summer that left us is everything he wrote. I would liketo believe that summer or the youth that I will leave behind is my art.

The exhibition is composed of four sets of canvases depicting the four seasons and the round, twometer- diameter Sonnet V canvas depicting the youth with the sonnet in his hand.

The first set of four round canvases, each 1 meter in diameter, personifies the seasons. The two major seasons, winter and summer, are personified by San Sebastián for the death in winter

and Bacchus for the joy during summer. Two poets personify the minor seasons by linking the seasons with their words: Rimbaud for spring and Rilke for autumn.

The second set of four square canvases, 150 x 150 cm, depicts my olive groves and the transformation of nature and its colours through the seasons. The presence of the only home in this exhibition

during spring metaphorically represents humans blossoming in our natural habitat away from the cement and concrete jungles. The third set of four rectangular 60 x 50 cm canvases depicts

the sibyls announcing the seasons. The sibyls are depicted as the trunks of the olive trees, mothers to all of us since the first mother to humans is nature. It is Her that dictates the rhythm of our lives,

the transformation of the tender passage that surrounds us, and the bodies that carry us through the voyage of our seasons. In Spring and Autumn, there are two sibyls: a Mother teaching her daughter how to blossom and then how to hold the fruits of nature to those who deserve them. The fourth set of four square canvases, 40 x 40 cm, is a poem of metaphysical light. The presence of the shade in the early vision of life and the discovery of the most potent light in its last stages. A friend and collector told me that when she saw this set, she saw in every one of the four of Dante’s voyages through hell, purgatory and Paradise.

- Gilbert Halaby