Compare and contrast: Less Is More highlights fascinating interplay between two artists' work

Dust Gallery's current show Less Is More, featuring the spare, neo-Op Art paintings of Jennifer Riley and pencil-and-adhesive-tape compositions of Marietta Hoferer, is perhaps the most sophisticated show yet at Dust, and it's had its share of solid shows. Exhibiting these two artists together is virtual genius; their work is vastly different, both in media used and appearance, yet seems to have sprung from a parallel, if not identical, theoretical impetus.

Riley's large-scale paintings amount to great white fields partitioned vertically with softly gradated, colored bands that subtly bend and waver as if pulled by some unseen force. This implied electromagnetic charge confers a super-dynamism to the tableaux. Riley's colored lines seem kinetic; they appear not only to be vibrating before your very eyes, but also to be generating a nearly audible electric hum, which itself seems to by turns amplify and decrescendo in time with the undulating lines.

Hoferer's white-on-white and transparent-on-white work read as studies in traditional Minimalism, yet they are deceptively simple. Her series "White Band" features eight square swatches of white paper, hung in a grid, each marked with faint pencil lines and horizontal bands of white artist's tape. Look closely, and you'll notice each band features multiple layers. Hoferer meticulously laid down strip after strip of tacky tape, one on top of the other, perfectly centered above the last. This artist's brand of Minimalism is not, therefore, the seemingly glib, conceptual stuff of early practitioners. Close inspection reveals just exactly how time intensive and ornate it really is.

Interestingly, the layering in some of Hoferer's work mirrors the effect Riley achieves in her gradated colored bands. This comparison is especially notable between Hoferer's "White Bands" and Riley's "Late Night Fortune Cookie," which hangs beside it and features striations comprising delicately layered tints of orange, purple and green, and serves as just one example of the harmony that exists between the two artists' work. In fact, the similarities and differences between these artists' work are seemingly infinite; it's a rare show that sparks such stimulating interplay.