I have followed Adeel Uz Zafar’s journey since his early days as a children’s book illustrator in the late 1990s — he even illustrated a few of my own books. My earliest encounter with what would later become his signature ‘scratch and reveal’ technique was a large painting from his National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore thesis show. He had reworked the piece, etching into the surface of a coloured drawing for our NuktaArt magazine’s One Square Mile project in 2009.

The same year, the exhibition ‘Size Does Matter’ at V.M. Art Gallery, Karachi became a defining moment for Zafar. The show catapulted him into the circle of Pakistan’s noteworthy emerging artists. The enormous scale of his works, paired with his meticulous rendering of soft toys tightly wrapped in gauze bandage and engraved on to plastic vinyl sheets coated with emulsion and acrylic gel, revealed an astonishing command over detail. Each waft and weave of the white threads of the gauze was offered up with almost obsessive clarity, setting him on a path he has continued to navigate since.

It was, therefore, intriguing to see his recent solo exhibition, ‘Overrated Underrated’ at Canvas Gallery, especially with a title that feels........

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