According to Jean Cassou, he was an artist because he was a revolutionary and a revolutionary because he was was an artist. In 1927, forced to leave Seville for political reasons, he went into exile in Paris. There he held exhibitions in several galleries and contributed as a graphic artist to the Spanish exile newspapers Tiempos Nuevos and Rebelión, and to the weekly Vendredi. He was arrested for taking part in a protest demonstration against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti and deported from France. He then settled in Brussels where he exhibited, worked as decorator, and illustrated Max Deauville's book, Rien qu'un Homme. In 1928, he left for Amsterdam, Vienna, then Berlin and travelled in the USSR for two months. En 1929, he settled in Berlín, where he held exhibitions, contributed to several publications, including the Berliner Tageblatt, and attended typography and interior design classes. At the beginning of 1930, the Socialist International (AIT) published his first album Días de ira.
After the fall of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, at the end of 1930, Helios returned to Spain and settled in Barcelona, contributing to several journals, L'Opinió, La Rambla, La Batalla, L'Hora, Bolivar and Nueva España and creating book covers and illustrations, mainly for left wing publications. This was the year in which he published the manifesto Por qué me marcho del anarquismo (Why I am quitting anarchism) and joined the Comunist Catalano-Balearic Federation, part of the BOC (Bloc Obrer i Camperol, the Workers and Peasant's Bloc). He was expelled shortly afterwards because of his antidogmatic stand. In 1931, he joined the PDC and ilustrated Mundo Obrero. In 1932, he was arrested in Madrid for his political activism and was imprisoned and transfered to the Jaén prison. He was granted bail to attend, as the Spanish representative, the International Congress of Proletarian Artist, held in the USSR, to whisch he had been invited by VOKS. He seized this opportunity to settle in the USSR until 1934. During this period, he visited Leningrad, lived in Moscow, and exhibited at the Pushkin Museum in 1933. Public Art Editions published his second album, Revolución Española.
His work departed from abstract figures to adopt a more politically committed realism, easy to decipher and whith a strong social content, but different from socialist realism, which he constantly criticised. He returned to Barcelona during the summer of 1934, but was arrested again in the autumn in connection with the workers uprising in Catalonia. He again left for Brussels where he published, at the beginning of 1935 his third album, on the 1934 events, entitled Viva Octubre.
He returned to Barcelona in 1935, and following the legalisation of left-wing organisations, with other artists of the Els Sis group, in 1936 he founded the Sindicat de Dibuixants Profesionals (The Union of Professional Designers), which was to launch the activist poster movement during the Civil War, thanks to intensive production of anarchist and republican posters. He also produced work for many publications as well as paintings on the war, approaching surrealism. At the beginning of the Civil War, he took to the barricades in the defence of Barcelona and joined the Aliança d'Intel·lectuals Antifeixistes de Catalunya ( the Catalonian Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals). He was appointed Political Commissar of the UGT (General Workers Union), and as such organised the Ramón Casanellas Column, sailed with the Bayo expedition to free Ibiza and Majorca, and joined the fronts in Aragon, Madrid and Andalusia. In charge of culture in the 26 th Divison, he designed the masthead and artwork of the newspaper El Frente, and organized the exhibition in homage to Durruti in Barcelona.
At the end of the war, he went into exile in France where he was interned successively in the concentration camps in Argelès-sur-mer, Bram and Vernet in the Ariège, and then was deported to the French camp in Djelfa (Algeria), between February 1939 and May 1942.
Back in Barcelona in 1942, he founded the short-lived group LNR ( Liberación Nacional Republicana, Republican National Liberation) and the Casa de Andalucía (the House of Andalucia). In 1948, he exhibited works of a surrealist style in the Arnaiz gallery, in Barcelona, and created murals for decorating various venues, the Colon jazz club and the San Jaime University Hall of Residence in Barcelona.
Between 1945-46 and 1948-54, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Modelo prison in Barcelona, where he painted the oratory known as the Capilla Gitana.
In spite of a liberation order signed in 1950, he was illegally detained for four more years and he died in Barcelona two years after his release in 1956.