In a world saturated with noise, the artworks of South African-born, US-based artist Johnathan Schultz imbue a quiet intensity. Soft, deliberate strokes of line, texture, and even material choice, whisper unspoken histories. His upcoming showcase, Lasting Impressions: Tracing Identity & Resilience, a discreet debut marking the end of Mandela Month, will feature a series of artworks centered on South Africa’s late president’s mark on the world. More than an exhibition, the showcase is an excavation of identity, endurance, and the marks we leave behind.
Schultz’s art does not shout. Instead, it lingers, draws you in, and invites closer inspection of the textures, the layers, and the deliberate imperfections that make each piece pulse with meaning.
At the centre of Lasting Impressions are five artworks depicting Nelson Mandela’s fingerprints, taken from his arrest warrant. In Schultz’s hands, the fingerprints are no longer merely forensic records; they become something more intimate: a meditative mapping of resilience.
“Fingerprints are more than biological marks. They are the architecture of individuality,” he explains from his studio in Las Vegas. “Every line, every curve is a pattern unique to one person. Stripped down to linework, it’s a portrait made of direction and distinction. The idea of something so personal yet so universal was the foundation for this series. Mandela’s fingerprints carry the weight of history. They were used to criminalize him, yet they also became his unshakable signature, proof of his presence through decades of struggle.”
The series, titled Lasting Impression (the first and largest piece, and the artwork from which the exhibition gets its name) and Refined #1-#5, transforms the ridges of loops, whorls, and arches of a fingerprint into meditations on permanence. The works are stark yet layered, much like Mandela’s legacy: etched into history, impossible to erase.
With an alchemical approach to materials, Schultz’s practice blends raw textures with archival fragments and industrial elements with gilded finishes, creating surfaces that feel both weathered and luminous.
“I’m not just layering mediums, I’m layering meaning,” he says. A fence in his work might appear decorative at first glance, only to reveal itself as a barrier. A tree, rendered in graphite, stands solitary, serene, only for its roots to be tangled in unseen chaos. “Beauty often disguises tension. That duality, between what we see and what it means, is what I am always reaching for.”
This interplay is especially potent in the works displayed as part of Lasting Impressions, where the roughness of the textures mirrors the fractures and repairs of the histories they represent. Two haunting pieces featuring empty swings, their shadows stretching long and thin, round out the exhibition. The absence in the works is palpable. The pieces are a quiet lament for lost connection and the shift from scraped-knee childhoods to screen-lit isolation.
While not immediately evident, the theme connects to the artist’s larger body of work, including the Mandela fingerprint series, unmasking and revealing what’s beneath the surface. The fingerprints trace the imprint of one man’s identity against the machinery of oppression, while the swings examine how systems, whether political, religious, or digital, reshape the landscape of our daily lives. Across Schultz’s work, the viewer is invited to consider both the personal and the collective: What have we lost? What do we carry? What remains in the imprint, in the shadows?
Schultz’s creative process is a dance between precision and surrender. His head bent over his workbench, he meticulously layers pigment, resin, grit, only to sand them back, peel them away, or let them crack. This tension is everywhere in his art, with light playing a crucial role and luminous finishes serving as veils. ‘They reflect light, yes,” he says, as he peels away at a canvas, “but they also reflect our tendency to polish over complexity. By manipulating how light moves, it forces you to look twice and question what’s real, what’s masked, and what’s enduring underneath. This technique is my way of exposing not just the foundation of the art, but of the subject itself.”
He admits that getting to this place was not easy, but he’s learnt to lean into it. “The best moments happen when the work starts to breathe on its own.”
The duality of the works is further shaped by the landscapes and systems that have left an indelible mark on its creator. At first glance, the depictions are easily construed as vessels of South African stories, structures, and memories. The layers of the grid compositions hint at control or abuse of authority, materials that resist polish, surfaces that reveal something buried beneath. Schultz’s experiences in the United States, meanwhile, add a new dimension, bringing a sense of openness, innovation, and a broadened visual language. The connotations of resilience come up again. Not merely survival, but a refusal. The works don’t just depict these ideas; they embody them. They hold the pressure of inherited systems and the persistence of something that survives them.
There’s a growing urgency in Schultz’s approach, but it’s not loud or aggressive. It’s a quiet that lingers, that makes you look twice.
“I want my work to sit with you, to unfold slowly,” he says. “The best stories, the best ideas aren’t the ones that grab you. They’re the ones that stay.”
And Schultz’s art? It stays.
