Negotiated Presence: Constructing Space Through Paint
Starts: Sunday, October 4, 2026
Meet The Artists: Sunday, October 4, 2026 between 1 - 4pm
Where: Atelier Ironwood, 1425 Lakeshore Rd. NOTL (2nd fl.)
Featuring Artists: Kyle Clements and Geoff Farnsworth
Ends: Sunday, October 25, 2026
Negotiated Presence brings together the work of Kyle Clements and Geoff Farnsworth in an exhibition that explores painting as a process of construction rather than depiction. Though working from distinct visual languages, both artists approach the canvas as a site of negotiation—where structure and intuition, control and improvisation, image and abstraction remain in active dialogue.
Kyle Clements translates the velocity and complexity of contemporary urban life into dynamic networks of colour, line, and spatial rhythm. Drawing from architecture, digital environments, and the sensory intensity of the city, his paintings emerge through a process of accumulation and adjustment. Layers of luminous colour and sculptural mark-making generate compositions that suggest aerial views, circuitry, and shifting urban systems. Presence in Clements’ work is not tied to a specific place but to the experience of movement, perception, and contemporary life itself.
In contrast, Geoff Farnsworth builds his paintings from the interior outward. Working between figuration and abstraction, he creates psychologically charged spaces where figures, memory, and gesture evolve through an intuitive and responsive process. His compositions resist fixed narratives, allowing forms to appear, dissolve, and reassert themselves across layered surfaces. Presence becomes emotional rather than descriptive—a condition shaped through colour, tension, and the accumulation of painterly decisions.
Together, Clements and Farnsworth reveal painting as an act of continual formation. Their works do not present finished conclusions but invite viewers into spaces that are assembled, revised, and discovered in real time. Urban systems and interior worlds, physical structure and emotional resonance, coexist within paintings that remain open, active, and alive.
Negotiated Presence proposes that meaning in painting is not imposed but built—through process, through material, and through the evolving relationship between artist, surface, and viewer.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Clements is a Toronto-based painter whose work captures the energy, density, and sensory overload of contemporary urban environments. His paintings translate the rhythm of city life—its lights, structures, screens, and movement—into vibrant networks of colour and line that hover between abstraction and representation.
Farnsworth is a Canadian painter recognized for expressive, semi-abstract figurative work that merges traditional training with colour-driven abstraction and intuitive process. Working between figuration and abstraction, he creates psychologically charged compositions where structure and spontaneity interact, allowing intention and accident to coexist
(Left) Kyle Clements. (Right) Geoff Farnsworth. Bird with Berries, 2026 oil on canvas 24” x 24” $2,300
