Pandemic, in 2020, Jayson Pettz Muring presented a solo exhibition, in the thick of the quarantine lockdown, Muring launched, “Beyond Norm,” adverting this time beyond the earth’s physical condition into the mental and spiritual stresses that reached intolerable levels of psychic crisis. In mid-year 2021, undeviating from his tectonic themes, Jayson Pettz Muring presents: “Whiskey Blues,” at The Artologist Gallery, Ayala Malls, Manila Bay.

In delving into his latest explorations, Muring, by his own admission, reinforced the flagging human spirit with a round of whiskey and the blues music lyrically moaning in his ears. Of necessity, Muring has shifted into an alternative reality, one purged with materiality and commercialism, now aspiring towards a symbolic incandescent Light.

Whence the origin of Muring’s imagery? In many an artist’s history – think Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Cezanne’s apples, BenCab’s Sabel, Luz’s cyclists and musicians – the source of the primordial image is vital, deepening the art and expanding the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the work. In the case of Muring, he follows in the admirable tradition of artists exalting their birthplace, evoking memories of a hometown, or even engaging with their physical space, either through the use of place-names or references. Integral to Muring’s identity as an artist are the indelible impressions of Boac, Marinduque, whose terrain, without being directly depicted or reconfigured, is saturated with the light-permeation of earthen colors of faded sepias, siennas, russets, taupes, and tans, with vivid inflections of sunflower gold.

On the other hand, the surfaces of Muring’s paintings convey the violence of nature, rending the earth into a volcanic quaking, leaving in its wake the clefts and crevices, the cracks and apertures, the fissures and orifices of a violated land. This physical devastation, as it were, transcends its material character, and in the hands of Muring, emerges as metaphors for disturbed spiritual states, working their way slowly, insidiously, into the viewer’s own psychic space. See what a shot of Scotch and some keening blues can do for Jayson Pettz Muring.