Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Yesterday as in Tomorrow, the first solo U.S. exhibition by Danish–Filipino artist Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen, on view 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 Cabrillos Jacobsen's work, place is interior and exterior, personal and inherited—shaped by geography, daily experience, and memory. Place emerges through return, gesture, and time folded into form.
Cabrillos 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 Cabrillos 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 presence, 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. Cabrillos 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. Their presence is quietly embedded—carrying histories of touch, use, and prior function. Cabrillos Jacobsen treats these materials as active components of the composition, folded into the same language as paint and line.
Cabrillos Jacobsen approaches painting through a layered visual vocabulary shaped by stillness. His sensibility is attuned to what lingers—remnants of place, shifts in atmosphere, traces of contact. Marks, textures, and intervals 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 seen, remembered, and shaped again through time.
Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen (b. 1996) is a Danish–Filipino artist, born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark. He earned a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2023. In 2024, he was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting at the Royal Palace Amsterdam—one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious prizes for emerging painters. He is currently based in Atlanta, pursuing an MFA at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.
Deeply influenced by his mother’s migration from the Philippines to Denmark at the age of 30, Cabrillos Jacobsen’s practice is rooted in painting and reflects a sustained inquiry into cultural contrast, identity, and belonging. He uses the medium as a tool for storytelling, reflection, and self-exploration. His paintings often navigate memory and identity with a rhythm that blends playfulness and melancholy. Cabrillos Jacobsen builds his compositions through layered applications of paint—scraping, revising, repainting—allowing time and remembrance to take form through surface and texture. These layered, tactile works become quiet, contemplative spaces: personal responses to the complexities of the present. A sense of in-betweenness lies at the heart of Cabrillos Jacobsen’s work: interior and exterior, presence and absence, the seen and the felt. His paintings often weave together fragmented narratives drawn from personal history, cultural memory, and the spaces that connect them.
Recent exhibitions include Moonlight Bunny Napping, Durst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague, NL; Holiday Activation, Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, US; Act II: The Observatory, Ombrella, Copenhagen, DK; and Royal Award for Modern Painting, Royal Palace Amsterdam, NL. His work is held in both private and public collections, including the AkzoNobel Art Foundation and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Art Collection. He is represented by Durst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague, NL.
