Can Magnolia’s digital work be classified as either Iris or giclée prints?
No. Magnolia’s digital prints have been made using either a thermal or Piezo technology inkjet printer, both of which use six colors of pigment. Pigment cannot (as of Jan, 2003) be used in an Iris (aka giclée) printer. An Iris printer uses charged plates to direct four very fine streams of red, yellow, blue and black dye onto the paper surface. The stream of ink is so fine that a liquid dye must be used. For many years the four-color Iris printer produced the best visual results. Today the far more permanent alternative to the Iris printer is an inkjet machine that uses six colors of pigment. Giclée, French for “to spurt,” was initially used to describe dye-based Iris prints done at Nash Editions in Los Angeles, California. This trendy term for an Iris print is quite an international embarrassment as the vernacular use of the word in France is “ejaculation” (rather apt for throwaway prints destined to last no more than a decade). Unlike pigment, dyes dissolve when mixed into a liquid.
