In 1991, Jack Duganne, a printmaker, searched high and low for an accurate word to describe his new digital printing process, and he came up with “Gicle” (pronounced: zhee-KLAY). This French word means “nozzle” and the verb form “gicler” means “to squirt, spurt, or spray.” To say that Gicle is a high tech reproduction or even pointing out that it is done in very high resolution and high fidelity simply does not truly paint a picture in the mind’s eye of what Gicle really is, and a person won’t fully understand until they see one. Gicle, the pinnacle of modern art print technology, is used to reproduce an artist’s original work so well that it is very hard to distinguish from the original.
Gicle does not incorporate mechanical screens or dots like older printing methods, so there are no dot patterns visible to the human eye. Sophisticated Gicle images faithfully reproduce all the beautiful tones and hues that the artist originally produced. A Gicle printer squirts out a continuous tone of over four-million microscopic droplets of ink, per second, onto either paper or canvas and the output may commonly be found in art galleries, museums, and photo galleries.
In the early days an IRIS ink-jet printer which was able to produce millions of colors using continuous-tone technology was used, but today’s technology far surpasses the early machines. Now large production Gicle printers are made by HP, Epson, Canon, and others but there are no “desk top” models so you still have to go to a specialist to get a Gicle done.