FELICS 9CENTO — A Portrait, a Nickname, a Friendship

FELICS 9CENTO (2026, enamel paint and pencil on wood panel, 48 x 48 cm) was painted four-handed by Leonardo Crudi and Felix FLX Braun, and it is as much a document of a friendship as it is a portrait.

The work was born during a short residency in Rome, when Braun was hosted at Crudi's studio and the two artists worked side by side at the same panels. The division of labour is visible on the surface: the biomorphic abstract forms of the background are Braun's, an echo of his mature abstract practice, while the geometric structure and the portrait itself belong to Crudi. The Roman artist chose to show his colleague in a double role — the raised fist of the politically engaged artist, and the glasses and scrutinising gaze of the intellectual.

The title carries the story of the friendship in a single phrase. "Er Felics 9cento" is an affectionate distortion in Roman dialect of Felix's name: "Er" is the Roman definite article, and "9cento" — Novecento — grafts him onto Collettivo Novecento, the group Crudi founded in 2016 with the artist Elia Novecento and the curator Giovanni Argan to combine public art, cultural memory and a rereading of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Renaming Braun in romanesco is both a joke and an initiation: the portrait symbolically marks the entry of the "Vasari of Bristol" into the collective, an artistic and human affinity strong enough to cross the language barrier between the two painters.

Beyond the anecdote, the pairing makes sense. Crudi and Braun share a past in graffiti writing and a present spent reworking the legacy of the Russian avant-gardes, each searching for his own point of equilibrium between abstraction and figuration. FELICS 9CENTO is where those two searches met on the same panel.