Golden: DEEP RYCA at Helm Gallery

Mega Powerpill, 135cm (54") diameter, 12cm (5") deep. Signed on verso. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery

Craft That Preserves What Nostalgia Flattens

By DELIA CABRAL November 27, 2025

Brighton is a long-established counterculture incubator. I came here first to trace the footsteps of Quadrophenia's angst-ridden journey, and discovered the city's real legacy runs deeper than cult classic cinema nostalgia. As the UK's unofficial LGBT capital and a decades-long magnet for ravers, mods, and misfits, Brighton has always been a place where outsiders become insiders. When Fatboy Slim threw a free beach concert in 2002, 250,000 people showed up. That's not just a crowd—that's a revolution. So it feels entirely fitting that Helm Gallery, Brighton's ambitious contemporary art space which opened in 2023, is currently hosting DEEP, a solo exhibition by RYCA (Ryan Callanan) exploring the acid smiley's journey from rave euphoria to cultural reckoning running from October 23 through November 30, 2025, the exhibition is paired with a concurrent pop-up exhibition by Fatboy Slim, Norman cook. These two exhibitions are a collaboration exploring how art and music can commingle to create popular culture.

Floppy disks containing FatboySlim’s original samples. Image courtesy of Delia Cabral

Original Fatboy Slim Hawaiian shirt collection. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery

Upstairs, Fatboy Slim's pop-up exhibition and book launch, It Ain’t Over…’til The Fatboy Sings, offers access to Norman Cook’s material archive of rave culture, filled with pictures, murals, paintings, and even some of his now-iconic Hawaiian shirts paying tribute to the crowned prince of Brighton's rave legacy. Downstairs, RYCA creates a visual beat and deepens that iconography into cultural commentary.

RYCA, The hallway entrance, with remixed “bonio” logos that reference Fatboy Slim's unofficial logo. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery

Descending into Helm's basement gallery feels like entering an underground club. The stairway is covered with yellow and black lettering and graffiti, with RYCA-minted coins free for the taking. The colours further reveal this duality: a warning and an enticement. Callanan has created over 600 smiley faces in various emotional states, some euphoric, others visibly altered, as if caught mid-trip, Baked. These round anthropomorphic spheres are remarkably effective; we find ourselves reflected in them. RYCA continues to transform and evolve Harvey Ball's 1963 morale-boosting "Smiley Face", originally designed for a Massachusetts insurance company for 45 dollars. The UK rave scene later adopted this symbol in the 1980s and 1990s. RYCA incorporates this image into a societal portrait of contemporary cultural duality: ecstasy versus the comedown. The universal smiley face, a simple yellow circle with two dots and a curved line, has become a heavily loaded icon symbolising unity, rebellion, and hedonism.

The emotional and technical range RYCA achieves is staggering, spanning diverse media: painting, sculpture, print, and mixed media. It is clear that Callanan likes to approach his work from all angles, bringing together inspiration and craft. His recurring faces become a visual beat, creating a rhythm throughout his work, while his meticulously crafted pub signs say what we are thinking. "Poptorian" is a term he coined to describe his use of Victorian pub sign-making craft traditions, including gold leaf gilding, relief carving, and Victorian-inspired lettering.

RYCA, A rave of acid faces. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery

When I asked Ryan Callanan about his artistic inspirations, he didn't hesitate. "Honestly, it would probably be Warhol," he began, "and then I would say the New York Kings. So it's like Keith Haring, Basquiat and Warhol." He paused, then added with a grin: "If I were to rewrite the Jesus story, they would be the three kings."

RYCA sees Basquiat's powerful visual lexicon as an example of what he aims for himself: an aesthetic so singular it becomes untouchable. "Basquiat's aesthetic is so powerful that no one can even make anything that looks like it," he explained. "It breaks the boundary of a genre... anyone who tries to look anything like it just is going to be shot down absolutely." For an artist who's spent decades refining a single icon, that's the goal: to make something so definitively his that imitation becomes impossible. Though at first glance the happy face seems universal, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that RYCA's faces are his unique lexicon, a recurring rhythm in his otherwise diverse practice that spans printmaking, painting, sculpture, signmaking, and even creating toys. There is nothing he won't turn his hand to.

I love speaking with artists like RYCA in depth, exploring their creative processes and uncovering revealing moments, like when Callanan shared what he calls the "secret" behind his smiley faces. "The smiley face being this beaming beacon of joy to most of us... is completely made of negative space, which can also be your past. It's like your past could be golden. Your past could be great and glorious and smiley, but it is also... a negative space." This moves beyond technical description; it is the conceptual engine that drives RYCA's work. The 23-carat gold leaf filling each smiley's concave relief makes the past precious, yet it remains a void, an absence, something that can't be retrieved.

RYCA recounted feedback he's received from collectors over the years: "They were all grown-up ravers. And they would always say, 'Oh, you know, I've got one of your smileys. And sometimes I feel like it's laughing at me.'" He found this fascinating rather than troubling. "I thought that was like a really crazy trippy thing, their own paranoia was reflecting off of it." The work functions as a mirror; what you see depends entirely on where you're standing, both literally and metaphorically. "It's like the ultimate positive icon," he insisted. "Just, I secretly love the fact that it's made of negative space." This duality extends to his craft; his work is often made "on a concave, sunken relief, which references the carvings of hieroglyphs, the earliest civilisations made reliefs incorporating images to document their life and times. That's how we know about them." By using his "Poptorian" techniques to preserve rave culture, RYCA argues that subcultural memory deserves the same material permanence as that of pharaonic dynasties. As one collector told him years ago: "People sit back and look at their art collections, if they've got one thing from you and it's made well... that's going to stand up in 10, 20, you know, longer years." RYCA's uses technical mastery of craft to elevate popular culture, creating work that preserves what nostalgia flattens.

RYCA, “Fuck you” Bespoke Timber frame, 23ct gold on Relief, spray painted Tooling Board and Silkscreen Printed Acrylic, Unique,52 x 52cm, Signed on verso. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery

DEEP, RYCA's solo exhibition, succeeds on many levels: the rhythmic repetition of his smiling faces, the glimmering Poptorian signs with cheeky phrases like "Hardcore will never die" and "Acidfuckinghouse" rendered in immaculate gold leaf, and his pièce de résistance, a large sculptural piece titled Mega Powerpill. Crafted from 23-carat gold leaf on a concave relief with a bespoke composite timber frame and printed acrylic, measuring 135cm (54") in diameter and 12cm (5") deep, it commands attention with an almost totemic presence. But RYCA isn't satisfied; he's preparing to go monumental. "I want to double the size of the one that is in Helm," he told me, "so it becomes over two metres in diameter, which is taller than any human. And that, for me, would be a massive milestone, a landmark achievement."

The concurrent Fatboy Slim exhibition upstairs deepens the dialogue. Big beat, the genre Fatboy Slim pioneered at Brighton's Big Beat Boutique in the 1990s, was itself a collage of northern soul, acid house, hip-hop, and reggae fused with breakbeats. Both artists construct meaning from cultural fragments: Cook through sampling sound, RYCA through sampling iconography. Both elevate rave culture beyond nostalgia, insisting through their craft that what happened here, in Brighton, on these beaches, in these clubs, matters enough to be preserved in gold leaf and Guinness World Records alike. As RYCA describes his practice, it's "a journey through underground culture, craftsmanship and varied mediums." Brighton, where 250,000 ravers once descended on the beach for a free Fatboy Slim concert, continues to attract creative souls and headonists alike looking for that perfect golden moment. Brighton is a place I now call home.
 

RYCA, Acid Mary, Plaster, polyester resin, spray paint and acrylic, 152 x 45cm, Signed on verso. Image courtesy of Helm Gallery