Painting, the exercise of representing the visible and suggesting the invisible, starts from matter. If it does not, if it does not tend towards matter, at least it does not manage to avoid it: painting requires pigments, panels, walls. It can remain in opaque matter, or transcend it. For Fra Angelico, the opacity of things must be pierced by theophanic light, and reflected in colour. His panels shine, following the Theologies of Light that Grosseteste and St. Bonaventure weave together. This image is the midpoint between the visible thing and its archetype; between objective space and the dissolution of each thing in the white of the mind in contemplation. Limbo where there is no will or tension, everything is subsumed in Grace.
During contemplation, the soul abandons itself, experiencing an emptying of the multiple, of corporality and of time. The Dominican Fra Angelico conceived his frescoes in San Marco for this exercise of abandonment. And these paintings plunge us into the white of a pure nothingness: a cloister, a timeless shadow on a wall; these images come to us just as the echoes of Eckhart appear in that Heidegger who seeks to remove the adherence of the entity to the being. An experience of liberation and silence.
As a background, a fence, a portico, a garden with Edenic plants. They induce the remembrance of places where we have always been.