Meet the Edinburgh street artist who paints rubbish instead of walls

It’s an especially chilly Thursday night and we’re standing outside a university building in Edinburgh’s Southside, near where Valér lives with his family. He kneels and takes the 12-inch disc out of its sleeve, revealing it’s already been spray-painted pink and light blue, and in the middle draws the profile of an abstract cartoon face with its nose jutting out at the top and a cross for an eye. For anyone familiar with his work, it’s instantly recognisable as one of Sior’s quirky characters. Around it, he writes: THE WAY IS THE TARGET.

“Now it’s done,” he says, blowing on the wet ink, “and I leave it somewhere and go away. I don’t mind what will happen. I leave it and I forget it, because I paint thousands and thousands.”

Sior’s work often features quirky abstract cartoon characters (Image: Sior) As a teenager, Valér tagged walls and buildings with graffiti in the small Hungarian city where he grew up with gay abandon, high on the adrenaline that came with it.  

“In the Roman army, the first line was the youngest because they are craziest,” he tells me. “And 10,000 years ago, the thing was how can I alone kill a big lion. “Now, it’s who can paint a big graffiti at 10 o’clock in the evening. We needed danger.”

But now, as a law-abiding father of three, he finds his canvases elsewhere on the street, reusing discarded objects, furniture and bits of wood.

“I became an adult, and I don’t want damage for people any more spray painting, I never paint illegal now because it’s not a joy – it was cool 25 years ago because I was a cool young man.

“I became a history and French teacher in an elite high school in Hungary. It was very problematic because everybody knew I was the graffiti guy, but at the same time I worked at the best school of the country – I was Mr Fekete.”

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A quick scroll through the @sior_csf page on Instagram shows in recent months he’s even painted on shoes, rocks, a globe and an old mattress. “I find any rubbish somewhere. I collect it, I paint it at home and then I leave it,” he says.

“Or I just walk and do it. I just spent five days in Berlin with one of my best friends and we walked five days non-stop walking and drawing.

“There is a French guy, Lorem, he does the same like me, he leaves everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of pictures.”

Now, with over 2,000 followers, his Instagram posts often spark a scavenger hunt with people racing to identify the location of the artwork so they can claim it. Given their popularity and how prolific Valér is, there’s no doubt his work hangs on the walls of hundreds of homes across the city. Indeed, I first came across the street artist around five years ago after his paintings started appearing in my brother’s flat; one, then another, and another until he’d amassed an impressive Sior collection found on the street.

As Valér looks around for a spot to leave his newest piece we’re approached by a security guard I half expect to tell us to move along. “Sorry, what is your name?” the man asks, and Valér introduces himself.  

Sior’s Instagram posts often spark a scavenger hunt as followers race to identify the location of the artwork (Image: Sior) “I found one of yours,” the man says, pointing at the vinyl, “it’s an old bit of wood with a nice wee drawing and stuff, signed as well. I’ve got it hanging up in my house.”

Having established himself as one of the capital’s better-known street artists, interactions like this aren’t unusual for Valér, who says they’re by and large positive, with the occasional “crazy guy”. “I am very happy because I have got basically 100% positive feedback,” he adds.

We turn into George Square and I ask where the inspiration for his distinctive, playful, and often political style comes from.

“My life is a cartoon and that is why I have got some different styles,” he says. “I can see a lot of Hungarian folklore, personal souvenirs, French cartoons, because of when I was a child – one family member living in France sent me a lot of French comic books and it was very, very important.

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“I hide in my art a lot of political questions, moral questions, man’s questions; who I am, what I do? and then sometimes I just paint.”

Valér fled his home country eight years ago to escape Victor Orbán’s authoritarian regime and has subsequently watched Russia invade neighbouring Ukraine, so the pitfalls of politics and consequences of dictatorship are never far from Valér’s mind – and often reflected in his art.

“Because of Orbán and Putin, you know what I am doing here in Edinburgh,” he says. “I would like to tell the newspaper readers this is not Hungary. This bastard Orbán, now pride is illegal, one million Hungarians left the country during the last 10 years. It’s not Hungary; Hungary is very full of very educated, European humans – not gibbons and apes. I’m not so optimistic about the future.

The artist uses discarded pieces of wood and other rubbish as is canvases (Image: Sior) But painting and making artistic statements about the sorry state of the world is “just one part of my life,” he says. “I work very hard five or six days a week and it’s just a part – but a very important part. I work a lot.

“I am a gardener, sometimes chef, sometimes gutterer and roof cleaner, now I am a landscaper. I do a lot, a kind of handy man, a painter as well.”

Valér’s art doesn’t pay the bills, but he doesn’t want it to. “I think it’s very important artists have a civil job, so you are independent from the art. I don’t want to become money maker, I want to paint what I want; nobody tells me.”

Anyone who wants to explore the world of Sior but doesn’t have time to roam the streets in the hope of stumbling upon a piece is in luck, as Valér is preparing to launch a small exhibition alongside friend and fellow Edinburgh artist Alain Monde which will be open from Saturday, March 29 at Hopetown Coffee on Broughton Street in Edinburgh.