Sentinel brings Ozbren back to the origins of his most visceral and unsettling language, where the digital becomes fertile ground for a tension between allure and unease. Nine eyes, nine presences, appear as profile pictures ready to embody identity, to assume a gaze, to return to the viewer the experience of being seen as much as of seeing.

The eye is one of the oldest and most universal symbols: a sign of knowledge, of protection, but also of control and judgment. Within the digital realm it acquires an amplified meaning, becoming an icon of surveillance and of the vulnerability with which we inhabit virtual worlds.

In Sentinel these eyes do not simply look: they scrutinize, pierce, invade, yet at the same time they offer the possibility of an extended identity, of a reflection in which to recognize oneself or from which to defend oneself.

The aesthetic Ozbren chooses for this series is rough, intense, grunge: a digital matter that feels consumed, worn, and for that very reason, more alive.

Visual influences recall the early 2000s Playstation 2 advertisements, with their ability to suggest surreal and claustrophobic worlds, where imagery is charged with tension and disorientation. Through Blender and Photoshop, the artist constructs a visual grammar that fuses the rawness of grotesque 3D with layered digital manipulation, creating images that resist the polished seduction of contemporary aesthetics in order to return instead an imperfect, almost abrasive matter.

Compared to his more recent series marked by glitch and low-poly, Sentinel emerges as a deviation, a return to a 3D surrealism unafraid of discomfort. Its deliberately contained scale, just nine works, does not diminish but rather intensifies its impact: each piece becomes a totem of the digital age, a visual fetish encapsulating the paradox of our online existence, constantly poised between the desire for visibility and the fear of exposure.

Sentinel is both shield and mirror: a guardian that watches over and a reflection that strips us bare. Nostalgia for a past aesthetic coexists here with a sharp critical awareness of the present, offering the viewer an experience that does not end in the act of looking, but compels us to question the very meaning of being observed and of observing in the digital world.