Art Review: Kazmier Maslanka’s "The Exact Point Between Love and Hate and Praise and Punishment"

by Agnieszka Iwanowski

In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, where boundaries between disciplines blur and new languages emerge, Kazmier Maslanka stands as a singular figure. His mathematical poem "The Exact Point Between Love and Hate and Praise and Punishment," accessible via his website at kazmaslanka.com, is a striking testament to his pioneering approach to "verbogeometry"—a fusion of poetry, mathematics, and visual art that challenges conventional notions of expression. Executed in the year 2000 this work, with its red-and-white striped target overlaid by a Cartesian grid and accompanied by two midpoint equations—X = (Love + Hate) / 2 and Y = (Praise + Punishment) / 2—offers a cerebral yet visually arresting meditation on duality, balance, and the intersections of emotion and logic that feels both timeless and prescient.

The piece’s visual foundation—a bold, concentric target—immediately evokes the precision of archery or marksmanship, yet its vibrant red-and-white palette suggests something more visceral, perhaps the pulse of human emotion. The superimposition of the Cartesian grid transforms this intuitive symbol into a space of rigorous analysis, a plane where abstract concepts can be plotted and measured. This juxtaposition is quintessential Maslanka: he invites us to see the emotional spectrum not as a chaotic swirl but as a calculable entity, reducible to coordinates. The equations themselves, rooted in the midpoint formula from analytic geometry, propose a poetic paradox—can the ineffable qualities of love, hate, praise, and punishment truly be averaged, distilled to a single "exact point"?

Maslanka’s use of the midpoint formula is both literal and metaphorical. In mathematics, it locates the center between two points, a neutral ground equidistant from extremes. Here, it becomes a poetic device, suggesting a liminal space where opposites reconcile—or at least coexist. The red-and-white target reinforces this idea, its concentric rings drawing the eye inward to a bullseye that might represent this elusive midpoint. Yet, the work resists easy resolution. The stark contrast of the stripes mirrors the binary oppositions in the equations, hinting that this "exact point" may be more theoretical than attainable—a provocative tension that lingers in the viewer’s mind.

Comparatively, Maslanka’s piece resonates with other poetic expressions that bridge the rational and the emotional, though few do so with such mathematical precision. One might draw a parallel to the Oulipo movement, where poets like Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec imposed strict constraints (such as lipograms or mathematical structures) to generate verse. Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, with its combinatorial potential, shares Maslanka’s delight in systematic creativity, though it lacks the visual immediacy of his target and grid. Closer still is the work of concrete poets like Eugen Gomringer, whose minimalist arrangements of words on the page—such as "Silencio"—use spatial relationships to evoke meaning. Maslanka, however, transcends their typographic focus by integrating algebraic formalism, elevating the poem into a multidimensional experience.

Where Maslanka diverges most strikingly is in his embrace of paradox as a structural principle. The notion of averaging love and hate, praise and punishment, recalls the metaphysical conceits of John Donne, who in poems like "The Flea" fused disparate ideas (a flea bite and romantic union) into a single, surprising image. Yet Donne’s metaphors were discursive, while Maslanka’s are diagrammatic—his poem is as much a visual equation as it is a linguistic one. This hybridity positions him closer to the conceptual art of Sol LeWitt, whose wall drawings married geometric logic with aesthetic intuition, though Maslanka’s emotional vocabulary adds a layer of human warmth absent in LeWitt’s abstractions.

The power of "The Exact Point" lies in its ability to provoke both intellectual scrutiny and visceral response. The target’s hypnotic stripes pull us in, while the equations demand we step back and calculate. It’s a push-and-pull that mirrors the emotional dichotomies it explores—love versus hate, praise versus punishment—and challenges us to locate ourselves within its framework. Is the midpoint a place of equilibrium or erasure? Maslanka leaves this unresolved, inviting viewers to grapple with the ambiguity.

Looking back from 2025, this piece’s creation in 2000 feels remarkably forward-thinking. At the dawn of the millennium, when digital art was just beginning to gain traction, Maslanka’s analog approach—marrying the tactile immediacy of a painted target with the intellectual heft of mathematics—offered a counterpoint to the pixelated experimentation of the era. In today’s art world, where AI-generated works and virtual media often dominate interdisciplinary discourse, the work’s enduring relevance lies in its defiant simplicity and its insistence that the tools of mathematics—often seen as cold and impersonal—can probe the human condition. "The Exact Point Between Love and Hate and Praise and Punishment" is not just a poem or a painting; it’s a philosophical inquiry rendered in bold lines and elegant formulas, a work that dares us to find meaning at the intersection of heart and mind. Twenty-five years on, it remains a rare and rewarding experience—one that lingers long after the bullseye fades from view.