Harvey’s series of Invisible Self-Portraits takes up the genre most associated with artistic self-examination and empties it of the self by a mirrored reflection of a camera’s flash, as though the work were a photograph not a painting. The Entrance to NY Home, at seven and a half by six inches, maintains the scale of a private domestic image: it is not meant to be seen across a room but to be held or hung at close range, in the manner of the small devotional paintings of the Northern Renaissance. The high finish of Harvey’s oil technique — applied to gesso board in the manner of a panel painter — makes the ordinary architectural subject (a doorway, a threshold, a bookcase) carry the weight of sustained attention usually reserved for a face.
