In Meatware Ecosystem II, Robert Roest explores and deepens the Meatware Ecosystem series from 2017. Roest continues his exploration of painting in relation to digital media. These images are based on stills from a series of video games. Due to the technique used by Roest, the work looks digital, as if the work was made by a character from a video game, or a creator from a visionary reality, whose limits are the limits of his own (virtual) universe. The images have an alienesque quality, they hardly interact with art history and seem to be downloaded visions from science fiction or a prehistoric reality. A reality where matter, time and space are different from the reality in which we live.

The images are simultaneously figurative and abstract, but not in a way that is in line with the abstraction and figuration that we know from art history. The abstraction is in what is depicted: because the figuration does not refer to the reality we know, the figuration itself is abstract.

Compared to the 2017 Meatware Ecosystem series, this one is more fierce, more fiery, more aggressive. The light sources seem to emit energies that render physical (human) life impossible: Poisonous, electric or radioactive; too cold or too hot, yet they have the beauty or appeal of a spiritual vision.

In these works Roest wonders how we relate existentially and psychologically to the extraneous (imaginary), non-earthly realities. Everyday banal human existence has been associated with realities beyond our sensory reality since we remember, realities of which the existence or nonexistence of it can neither be proven with any certainty.