The title of Jonathan Ryan’s exhibition at Megan Mulrooney comes from a line in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row, set in Monterey, California. “It is the hour of the pearl,” he writes of the silvery sky that appears just before the sun rises or sets, “the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.” Each painting in the show is set during that hour, and in each the oils have been mixed with sand and decomposed granite, which gives them grain and depth. The sense of stopped time and long shadows in Ryan’s images recall the unpopulated spaces in Giorgio de Chirico’s piazza paintings. And the primeval palette puts one in mind of mystics Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton. The formal gradations of color climbing behind Ryan’s spires, trees, plateaus, cones, and arches suggest a cosmic omniscience. —Laura Jacobs