Watercolors, dead poodles, and lots of hilarious nudity

The healthiest couples spend time together and take time apart to do their own thing, or at least so hopes a boulder-y Michael Chiklis. Making art together and apart, Brian Jones and Brian Scott.

Longtime partners for reasons other than sharing the 8th most popular boy's name of 1972, the Brians made their commercial mark with outdoor commissions (murals, faux finishes...), but they also work both collaboratively and separately as "Chuck and George" to produce satirical, surrealist paintings toeing the line between subversive winks and total shockers, just like Silkk, minus the subversive winks. "Chuck" Jones' solo focus is obese, hirsute, grimacing watercolor nudes that parody Renaissance styles (The Burp of Venus: bloated, bushy Love Goddess + gleaming cherry pie), while "George" Scott's references the likes of Blue Boy painter Thomas Gainsborough as he replaces opulent dandies with apes holding guns; condemning/celebrating happiness & decadence is their Swiftian, mutually realized "Pursuit of Love in the Trinity Basin" series, showing Oz's Emerald City in the distance while the artists (cast as clowns) navigate a landscape littered with crow-pecked poodle carcasses and maleficent cherubs, as opposed to "maleficent chair rubs", what Congo's "Amy the Gorilla" childishly calls sub-par lapdances. Opening Saturday, their Joker show showcases their latest individual works, starting with Jones' Rabelaisian watercolor portraits (some inspired by actual denizens of Central Park), as well as animated loops of dancing grotesques and homages to Eraserhead and The Nanny, a late-career Bette Davis suspense flick second only in terror to Fran Drescher.

Brian Scott's Joker contribution's the "Carni-sutra", a humorous take on everyone's favorite how-to manual that uses Japanese woodblock-inspired lines and colors to illustrate carnival clowns and freaks as homoerotic duos -- which might leave you hunting for the Invisible Woman.