Municipal Bonds is proud to announce Yesterday as in Tomorrow, the first U.S. exhibition by Danish–Filipino artist Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen, on view in the gallery's annex from July 10 to August 23, 2025. The exhibition features a body of small oil paintings—on canvas, wood, burlap, and a book cover—that speak to intimacy and recollection in relationship to place. In Jacobsen's work, place is interior and exterior, personal and inherited-shaped by geography, daily experience, and memory. Its presence emerges through return, gesture, and time folded into form.
Jacobsen's paintings begin from inward experience—often individual, sometimes collective—and develop through a process of layering, erasure, and revision. His surfaces are sites of negotiation, where memory takes form not as narrative but as recurrence. The act of painting is deliberately provisional—lines doubled back, shapes altered mid-course, colors worked until they settle into balance. In this way, each composition becomes a space for re-seeing: what remains, what shifts, what resurfaces. The result is a field of correspondences, to somewhere, from when.
In many of Jacobsen's works, place takes the shape of a room—quiet interiors bounded by floor, wall, window, or threshold. These are not architectural renderings but partial enclosures: spaces constructed through light, shape, and spatial tension rather than descriptive detail. The room becomes a container for relation—between light and ground, past and present, inside and outside. Its edges suggest shelter and separation, but also openness-a frame through which to think about closeness, distance, and return. Chairs, vases, and doors appear with quiet clarity. They offer no narrative, only placement—articulating the image from within, as if remembrance had arranged them.
Figures emerge and recede, remaining loose and associative, or absent altogether. Their presence feels distilled from observation yet unbound by it—leaning, resting, inhabiting. Their placement reflects a kind of ease—neither staged nor symbolic, simply part of the surface's unfolding. Jacobsen's interest lies in how a figure can hold space: through color, through posture, through the suggestion of relation.
Fragments of textile and wood occasionally enter the surface, not as contrast but as continuation. These elements bring lived context into the frame, through texture and association. They are quietly embedded—carrying histories of touch, use, and prior function. Jacobsen treats these materials as active components of the composition, woven into the same language as paint and line.
Jacobsen approaches painting through a layered visual vocabulary shaped by stillness. His sensibility is attuned to what lingers—remnants of place, shifts in mood, traces of contact. Marks and textures accumulate into compositions that feel quietly whole. Color becomes a way to hold mood, conveying a closeness more felt than described. Across each surface, the process remains visible: forms undone and reimagined, timelines overlapping, recognitions partial. Each painting is a sustained act of attention—across what's remembered and seen.
