NEW YORK—When I ran into Moti Hasson Gallery director Tairone Bastien at the Art (212) fair back in October, he was championing the artist Paul Pagk and showing a few of Pagk’s works that question traditional notions of beauty, symmetry and balance.

Bastien added that collectors from the 1980s and ’90s would probably best remember Pagk—the British-born, New York-based artist who garnered attention with exhibitions at New York’s Thread Waxing Space and CRG, and several French galleries, before nearly disappearing from the scene. He hadn’t had a New York exhibition in several years, but Bastien was convinced the artist was poised for a comeback, along with the “rebirth of abstraction.”

“Honestly, I think abstraction is coming back in a very big way,” Bastien told me.

His enthusiasm was contagious, so I was eager to catch up with Pagk nearly five months later, when Moti Hasson mounted a full-blown exhibition of his new works, titled “Paul Pagk: Aftermath and Lexicon,” running through March 24.

I chatted with the artist recently as he hung works for the evening’s opening reception, and he told me about the transformation of both his work and the art world over the past three decades.

While he’s been flying under the radar, Pagk has been busy creating a new series called “Lexicon” that departs from his usually larger-scale abstractions—although both are on view in the gallery. The oil on linen pieces appear on a more human scale and are always one-inch from square (measuring 25 x 24 inches and 28 x 27 inches). Yet in keeping with his previous works, the series shuns narrative techniques to address painting for painting’s sake.

The artist said he began to change the way he thought about art after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. “Although (my paintings) have nothing to do with Sept. 11, they have to do with my questioning of the reason for painting after that,” he said. “How can you be true to the ideals in painting after that kind of tragedy? It’s about my relating to the process of painting.”

When I asked him if he thinks today’s younger artists, coming into today’s booming art market have an easier time than he did after leaving Paris’ National School of Fine Arts in 1982, his answer was a resounding “no.”

“I think I was kind of lucky,” he said. “I think it’s much more difficult now because there are more artists—many, many more artists. We also didn’t have the prices that are going now; there wasn’t this commoditization of art when I started out. You could be an artist and not be what is called successful then—the whole idea of success had nothing to do with it. It was punk era, and we didn’t care. We could live on nothing. I squatted and I slept on friends’ couches. When I helped Tim Nye open Thread Waxing Space, it wasn’t about success. It was about art; it was about creating an event.”

But while the bohemian atmosphere of the ’80s and ’90s might be long gone, Pagk heartily agreed with Bastien that abstraction is here to stay.

“I think there’s always been an interest with artists of my generation, and I think there is a very strong interest with the younger generation, too,” he said. “It’s all about questioning what you can do with the medium—reinventing and finding newness in something that isn’t new.”