Eventual, forthcoming, expected – also beyond what’s shown or expressed, Ulterior describes paradoxical tensions between architecture, landscape, and objects in an exhibition of new paintings by Derek Paul Jack Boyle. Like a dismembered gallery or studio space, fragments of pensive empty rooms; blank walls, doors, windows, stairs, hallways, collide with and collapse into desert landscapes of canyon clefts, roads, trees, rocks, and prismatic skies. In a show about showing, Boyle equips the stuff of solitude as metaphors for interpersonal dynamics. In lieu of figures, utilities, such as chairs, extension cords, lamps, and ladders, act as characters when set in relation to their broken and amassed surroundings.

While stylistically immediate, abstracted color fields merge to form deep durational distances. Textured with grass, walls, dirt, ice, clouds, and light, flat plains of painterly space meet at exaggerated angles to construct impossibly sharp perspectives and durational depths. In illusory scenes, intermediate terrains demarcate infinite pathways, as observed in the stretch of chairs and candles precariously supported by dark-violet ice in The Path, or following an electrical current from an outlet into unknown territory in Extension.

Set in theatrical palettes of dusks and dawns, voids and connections of impossible landscapes flip space to reveal secret passages and hidden portals, staging a choice to enter or bypass as in Decision, Shooting Star, and The Distance. In a hauntingly hued mese en abyme, or scene containing a smaller version of itself, Model Room displays a recursive iteration of itself, even replicating an inexplicable veil of light emanating from the room’s corner. The Droste effect of eternal returns is magnified in Show Mountain in which a framed sunset that could play the role of either window or painting, is exhibited next to a sculpture-cum-venue mountain that endlessly repeats replicas within. A sense of comedic dread mounts when the punchline is that the punchline may never arrive.

Merging, incepting, interrupting, or otherwise set in relation, the inanimate is animated with meaning when playing out private melodramas. For Boyle, new worlds are discovered in intermediate spaces; between interiors and exteriors, earnest and joking, inevitability and mystery, beginnings and endings. While not solid destinations, the scenes trust in their own premonitions that eventually a path will appear.