Runaway Train

September 24, 2025

I’m back at the cafe where yesterday I asked DJ Boyfriend to play a tune for me . He reluctantly did so, but I admired his vibes for accepting such an off-kilter request so decided to return. It’s a fairly cozy cafe, sunken in a basement up a backstreet tucked behind a heavy door you have to thump your body against to open. On the wall there is a very odd painting, and I cannot decide if I like it or not. It’s about one meter long by 60 centimetres high, so somewhat panorama in format. It’s pictorial, and the scene depicts what I presume to be the Main Square of Trenčín yet looking at it there seems to be something a little off in its partially-realistic depiction of the square. There is, of course, the castle omnipotently lurking high above in the far right hand corner, perfectly perched to snipe peasants and marauding invaders from siege, a medieval panopticon that has always made me feel slightly uneasy.

Mystery painting has me bewitched.

The castle is the pride of Trenčín, reproduced endlessly on magnets and t-shirts and postcards (I’m surprised they never stylized it into the city’s logo), a relentless reminder that WE HAVE A CASTLE! I mean, it is beautiful, precariously balanced on the precipice of collapse yet under no circumstances will that castle ever collapse. I climbed up there in the spring late one afternoon, only to be greeted with its closure. In spite, I have never returned. I am, in some regard, the anti-tourist, so thoroughly uninterested in what the city expects me to be interested in. Instead, I prefer the hidden and unfamiliar, the ragged edges of the city, places and sites that if they were ever to be made into a magnet or a postcard, would essentially be a forgotten lot, relegated to some junk shop, sold off as cheap fuel. “That’s not very pretty,” someone might say. But cities are a form of messy memory, they hold complicated histories which also deserve to be recognized as much as the iconic.

The work I am pursuing here is poking about this concept, that the supposedly “ugly” are the very things that feed and maintain the city. Tourist attractions smooth over any sharp edge, transforming the reality of a city into an image, something only to be gazed upon, admired. But I like the mess, as this is precisely where meaning sits: it is in that forgotten space where heritage, development, and logistics all collide to create the reality that we inhabit.

Back to the painting. It a singular point of view from the perspective of the artist, or some gazer, looking down the square. Mierovié, the square’s name, is a long, narrow, tube — hot dog! — shaped plaza, with nearly-ancient low-rise buildings ringing its edges. Its centre point is a Roman column, inscribed with some Latin that I don’t know what it means. I did, in the spring, meet with the local historian, but that conversation has slipped my mind. It’s a very pleasant square, utterly constructed out of cafes and terraces that offer everything from Instagram-worthy cheeseburgers to late night beers. But in the painting, Mierovié is punctured by… a high speed train, zipping through one building’s alleyway opening on the righthand side through another on its right. Why?! If the plaza is a hot dog, then imagine the train like a toothpick, piercing the wiener with the city fading into the distant haze.

It’s a monochromatic picture, hardly any colour. It looks as if the painting takes place in the winter months, all shades of grey and white casting a pall over the entire scene. The train, too, is depicted in the same colour scheme. I’m stuck, perhaps reading too much into a simple image. It’s easy to say, well, your commission is about dis-used rail infrastructure: of course you are intrigued by this painting. But I think there’s something else latent in this; the castle has been supplanted in favour of a random inexplicable train, a reminder that much of the city is messily tucked away, a kind of document for emblem versus metabolism. I think this painter also doesn’t really care much for the castle. Or rather, in some way they are also saying: sure, the city as postcard extracts attention, but the train is what enables the city to endure, to deliver, and to continue. Maybe. I’ll ask who painted it (1).

(1) I asked: the barista (DJ Boyfriend’s girlfriend!) had no clue; she was just as puzzled by it as I.