Oren Eliav’s paintings are rooted in the history of western culture and are embedded with Christian religious imagery. As an Israeli painter, his work brings to light the complex relations between the asceticism of the Jewish heritage and the rich and lush culture that characterizes parts of Christian visual culture. By dismantling and re-arranging historical modes of painting, he reevaluates the meaning of painting as a medium and provides a contemporary perspective to traditional iconographic formulas. His unique position in relation to Western-Christian culture, one that is both outside and inside, enables him to extract profound insights on the nature of the mental, cultural and physical relations between painting and its viewer, both in the past and in the present. The main character of his paintings is painting itself. Whether it is a marble checkered floor, an ornate church ceiling, an altarpiece or a bell—the works serve as a platform for a study of painting’s essential role as a mediator of narratives and representations. In “Advent”, the focus is devotional painting, as it is found in Northern Renaissance and early Netherlandish altarpieces. In the conversation printed in this catalogue we tried to understand the motivations of Eliav’s attraction to devotional painting and discuss what bonds painting and religion together.