We had been seeing news over the weekend, you never can really trust things on line, best to wait until the fact can be separated from the fiction although it would now appear that the news of the passing of the artist known as Helch has been confirmed by the London gallery he was recently loosely working with (BSMT Space) as well as by a number of other trusted people.

We can’t really let the news of the passing of the artist and the mystery that Helch was go by without a nod of respect. I didn’t really know the guy, I didn’t really want to, I liked the mystery, I liked the way his work would just appear, I didn’t really want to look under the hood, sometimes you don’t want to know anything about an artist beyond their work, I really like(d) his work. I had seen him about, him doing his art thing while I was doing mine, we had shared walls, him with one of his long poles, a roller on the end, filly focused on the job in hand, a real craftsman, an artist at work and a pleasure to watch…        

The news of Helch’s passing has probably put a rather dramatic full stop at the end of the story of one of the city’s most distinctive (street) artists. No, I’m not going to get into the debate about what street art is or where Graff ends and street art starts, he was an artist, and once he crossed that line and hung his work on a gallery wall he most certainly was thinking of himself as an artist.

It was impossible not to see his art on the walls of London (and beyond), you’d admire how he had got that one up there and more than that you’d admire the pop art perfection of it all; his repeats, his cutting it down to just than very familiar H, the way he used that familiarity to add to the mystery… 

I don’t know when I first became aware of him? A dozen or so years ago, I probably have hundreds of photos of his work (I have been photographing the street for many years, mostly in terms of the #43Leaves pieces, I do have quite an in-depth ‘accident’ record of London’s street art as a result of my own practices). Helch’s art was everywhere, those big blocks of letters on railway bridges, the tops of buildings, he was impossible to ignore, a lot more than a tediously rushed tag or something just for attention’s sake, there was far more to the art of Helch than that in his clean, consistent lettering that evolved so well.

He didn’t give me the idea that he was precious about any of it, that he understood that Graffiti and by extension any kind of street art is is built on the idea that a wall or surface is temporary and contestable. He was well versed, he knew the score, the bit about it not just being about producing attractive lettering: it was about visibility, territory, repetition and the audacity of it all, the challenge to others, the sport (although now, if he really has gone, I do hope at least a few pieces will be respected and not seen off with the peas that wanted a chance…)

True, I didn’t like his gallery work as much although you suspect his best in terms of work in frames hanging on white walls ways yet to come, that he was just finding his feet and the different language a gallery requires.

I will smile every time I see a big H, when I pass one of those many many Helch pieces, and there is a bit of me still hoping the internet has got it wrong or that he’s on some great big Hoax and that there is a punchline to be delivered. Whatever the case his art will live on up there on the walls for years out of the reach of the others, I really like(d) seeing a new Helch H, he always makes me smile on that train ride in from Hackney to Liverpool Street.

I liked Helch, I liked his art, he did it well, he had a sense of it all, he left his mark and he left it well… (sw)    

RIP Helch

(the first two images were blatantly borrowed from the internet, I should have made a note of the names of the photographers, sorry! Bad of me. I shall dig out some of the hunseds of photos I have in a day or two…)