WHAT IS THE GLICEE TECHNIQUE ?

Glicee
The glicee technique allows you to reproduce works of art with greater colour precision and resolution than any other printing method. This technique consists of depositing the pigment in the form of microscopic drops "pulverizing the support". With this technique, great detail is achieved in the shapes, and it can also produce wefts, patterns and continuous tones.

The result is works of Fine Arts of the highest quality, using inks that offer an image permanence of several hundred years, since the quality of a Glicee exceeds what is done with traditional processes and this has been recognized by different professional circles.
Thousands of photographers, painters or cartoonists use this technique for their works and thus, museums, galleries, collectors, art publishers around the world, exhibit, market, hoard and disseminate colour or black and white works with this technology.

What is Fine Art Glicee?
The world of images has been drastically transforming its forms since the term Glicee appeared for the first time in 1991 to describe what is also known as Fine Art prints. An innovative concept in which the technology, human talent and high quality resources are related to produce works of art.

Glicee. A french term.
Glicee, a French term, is an image printing technique whose name comes from the verb glicer, that is, to spray. It consists of pouring the pigment in the form of microscopic drops, sprayed on the canvas or paper continuously, just as a high-pressure aerosol sprayer works.
Unlike what happens with most continuous ink printers, which release regulated amounts of ink only when necessary, in the Glicee process, the ink is added to the support in a millimetric way and under high pressure, thanks to a system of vibration with pieces of piezoelectric crystal. In this process, the ink drops are given a specific electrical charge so that those that are not needed are electrostatically discarded into a waste collection system that does not interfere with the printing.
This system that, like everything technological, requires a precision that seems miraculous, obtains reproductions that are of a sharpness impossible to think of under any other work pattern. That is why it is so valued as a working method. Thanks to the use of special inks and papers, typical of the technique, Fine Art works are guaranteed to last almost forever.

The wonders of glicee
One of the wonders of glicee is its ability to capture the fine details of shapes. Although other means are combined so to do. Without the technique of Fine Art work, certain borders, wefts and patterns that define the image would not be transferred to the paper in such a precise way and the continuous tone, especially in gray or muted tones, would not be as exact.
Also, Fine Art is a term directly associated with papers or canvases of the highest quality. It is not an empty label, the paper or canvas on which one works in Fine Art has to meet very specific quality criteria.
We are talking about paper or canvas whose composition differs quite a bit from normal photographic paper, it is made up of natural fibers, mostly cotton or alpha cellulose, it has not been artificially bleached with chlorine, it has a neutral PH and a special treatment that is what guarantees the permanence of the work.

History of glicee printing
Jack Duganne, an expert in the area of printing and head of the Fine Arts department at Nash Editions, created the neologism Glicee to name this peculiar way of printing images. In 1991, he realized that it was necessary to perfectly differentiate the types of printing that were used by the famous Iris printers, who had already coined the term Iris Proof for a type of high quality printing, which he considered in reality a proof of press before the work was mass ordered.

In the mid 80's
Two employees of Applicon, the leading company in the field, created Iris Graphics,Inc. and in them its Iris printers, which quickly became the most suitable medium for the reproduction of graphic works on different supports: paper, canvas, silk, linen. It was very well received by specialists, photographers, artists and even colour engineers, since they were certainly in front of a system capable of producing high quality images and great colour definition, to the point that it was selected by Davis Coons, the colour engineer of Wall Disney Company, for the new 3D images of the Disney studios.

An interesting Fac.
It was Conns who wrote the printing manual for such important works as Sally Larsen's "Transformer" series in 1989 and for a 1990 exhibition of Graham Nash's supergroup "Crosby, Stills and Nash." Nash is a photography collector and published photographer who was so impressed with the quality of the reproductions of his work featured in the exhibition that he invested $126,000 in an Iris printer and founded "Nash Editions," where Duganne gave the name of Glicee to the work they did.
Most likely, without the risk of those two Applicon employees, Graham Nash's vision and Jack Duganne's knowledge, the possibility of having images whose sharpness and colour are exactly what the man sees in his mind, before daring to capture it on paper or canvas, it would not exist.