Nine eyes, nine suspended presences, ignite in the darkness like outposts in an uncertain territory, neither fully real nor entirely virtual, but situated in that in, between space where so much of our existence now unfolds. They do not observe us with the distracted curiosity of a passerby, but with the unwavering patience of something built to watch, a recording machine, or perhaps a predator lying in wait.

We look at them, and something quietly shifts: it is no longer us who hold the gaze, but the gaze that encloses us. We are no longer subjects but objects, bodies crossed by a vision we cannot interrupt or escape. And in this silent inversion the first unease arises: becoming aware of being seen changes the way we exist.

To look is never an innocent act. To look is to select, to reduce the infinite complexity of reality into something that can be contained. It is a gesture of power, even when it appears harmless: whoever looks imposes a frame on what is seen, fixing it into a form.

To be seen, by contrast, is an experience of loss: loss of control, of boundaries, of opacity. Under another’s gaze, we become surface, exposed skin, an image open to interpretation. What was once intimate and invisible becomes public, and no longer belongs to us.

This is the condition that Sentinel evokes: a constant oscillation between subject and object, between looking and being looked at, between the desire to appear and the fear of being caught in the act.

To live in the digital realm is, after all, to accept living inside a display case perpetually lit, where every gesture leaves a trace and every trace can be seen. Visibility is no longer an event but a permanent state: an air we breathe without noticing, yet one that shapes us, erodes us, makes us other.

In this context, the eye becomes more than an organ or a symbol: it becomes an architecture.

A space that absorbs what it touches, a transparent cage that follows us everywhere. These nine digital eyes do not merely return an image: they swallow us, they absorb us into their sight. And in doing so, they compel us to measure how much of our identity is now woven into the gaze of others, and how little remains invisible, elusive, truly our own.

Sentinel is therefore an experience of passage: from the presumed freedom of the observer to the vulnerability of the observed. It is the moment we understand that the gaze does not merely illuminate, it engraves. It does not just reveal, it transforms. It never leaves us as it found us.

To look at these works is to accept this silent exchange: to offer something of yourself, even for an instant, to those unblinking eyes. To understand that, in the age we inhabit, the act of looking and the act of being looked at have become inseparable, two faces of the same desire, and of the same quiet condemnation.