In 2013, Jan Hoet organised Middlegate, an exhibition that created a dialogue between so-called traditional artists and those labelled art brut or outsider artists. Ten years later, the Werft cultural centre in Belgium, in partnership with S.M.A.K., invited Philippe Van Cauteren and Pierre Muylle to formulate a contemporary response to what began in Geel a decade earlier.

TAGELDIMDE/MIDDLEGATE does not think in terms of outsider, neurodiverse or crip. Through works by 54 nationally and internationally selected artists, the exhibition seeks to create an inventive artistic experience that exceeds conventional categories and preconceived ideas. To enable this, all works are presented without the artist’s name or the title; the exhibition is experienced through anonymous artworks.
At the initiative of curators Philippe Van Cauteren and Pierre Muylle, the OPZ psychiatric hospital in Geel allowed me, for the first time in its history, to immerse myself in its archives.
I conducted intensive research over many days in the OPZ archives in July and August 2023.
In parallel, I continued to paint in the studio.
This research nourishes and influences my painting without illustrating it.
The archives have become the ghosts of a pictorial space.
Three bodies of work emerged in September 2023:
a series of paintings on canvas, a series of ink drawings on paper, and a group of texts on paper.

Among the hundreds of documents, I focused on notebooks from 1913–1918, which record the brief ritual observations of psychiatrists about each patient during the first five days after their arrival.
Reading these First World War notebooks, I concentrated more specifically on the diagnoses of female patients that seem close to what we would now call simple and complex post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD).
They testify to the after-effects of war, exile, separation, detachment and violence more than a century ago—inscribed in different space-times, systems of thought and socio-politico-economic conditions—while revealing traces that are the same as today and provoking the emergence of the power of imagination and fabulation.

Through this work I became interested in the crossings between unreal yet real worlds: between nightmares and news, dreams and realities, delusions, psychedelics and imaginations; in what the tensions of an unsafe environment such as war inflict on the fragile, permeable human mind, making it both resistant and constantly striving to construct a new life in an unreal world.
Painting opens up playgrounds where ghosts move between inner and outer reality, between the reality of life and that of death, without being fixed as real or unreal, true or false.
Ghosts and revenants, visible or invisible, are central figures in the paintings. They are apparitions of lives and deaths inhabiting an abandoned space, a privileged site for encounters between life and death.
Painting thus transforms horror into tragedy, the real into the imaginary.