People born on the same day as Nico Brown and Will Schumacher are said to be ruled by Neptune, the planet of visions, illusions, and dreams. The fact that they share the same birthday and grew up together is such an unlikely coincidence that it feels impossible to ignore. And while Nico and Will have followed distinct paths in their lives and pursued separate aesthetics, this invisible thread seems to link them together and defines their fantastic landscapes of distorted reality running through their bodies of work. Neptune, with its ocean of “superionic water,” is also the planet of blurred boundaries, its dense fluid moving slowly together. This blurring, the intersection of dreaming, can be found in Nico and Will’s show “IN BETWEEN” at Fort Hall Gallery, celebrating the liminal spaces in creative practice where artistic processes converge and inform one another.

Over the last two years, Nico and Will have shared a studio space, working side by side, in a chaotic scene of rattling spray paint cans, crumbled tubes of acrylics, and bits of discarded wood frames and canvas. While they have each retained their own voice and individuality, a dialogue has emerged in their time together, united through color, practice, and the hazy psychedelic qualities of their works. In their first group show and inaugural exhibition as artists, Nico and Will capture the relentless drive to experiment, exploring art as play and craft, sometimes unserious and light-hearted, sometimes troubled and unsettling. Their showcase piece, “In Between,” and exhibition namesake, is a group effort between the two and crystallizes their exchange and the blending of aesthetic patterns. As John Bisbee says, “This show is a rare debut by two young Maine painters who are also old friends. Working side by side they have each uncovered strange worlds and secrets that we can now whisper about.”

A wry humor runs through each of Nico and Will’s paintings. Nico, endlessly entertained as a child by Looney Tunes cartoons, riffs on the often dark and violent absurdities faced by the humanoid animal characters in each episode. As he describes in his favorite trope: “when a cartoon figure steps off a cliff, gravity doesn’t affect them until they become aware of the problem”—plummeting but never perishing. This interplay of awareness and denial, reality and dream finds expression in his paintings through remnants of outlandish, cartoonish figures with googly eyes, elongated limbs, and bulbous bodies peering through neon slashes of colors and frenzied strokes. It is a heavy irrationality, almost uncomfortably childish and yet inherently adult, that is found in all his works.

For Will, humor is more satirical in its origin—a moody confrontation with the viewer that challenges us to find a hidden meaning. There is an obstinacy to his works, as they stubbornly reaffirm their own flatness and process. Overlapping drips and splatters of pigment and spray paint, often constrained by stark lines and geometric patterns, ask us what truly distinguishes design from art. With a background in graphic design, he plays with our perception of depth and meaning; his paintings almost act as a parody of a parody of the great Abstract Expressionists. For Will, the act of making is art’s true purpose, describing his process as “leaving the ‘sludge’ behind” to remove all outside noise and focus microscopically on the shapes and forms he loves most.