Juan Tamariz, a zany, shaggy-haired, crooked-toothed magician whose ingenious card tricks baffled audiences and perplexed other sleight-of-hand practitioners, earning him mythical stature as the world’s preeminent master of close-up magic, died Aug. 18 in Madrid. He was 83 years old. The cause of death, in a hospital, was sepsis, said his daughter Ana Tamariz. He also had Parkinson’s disease. Self-deprecating, with an energy that bordered on mania, Mr. Tamariz was a bit of Woody Allen mixed with Gilbert Gottfried and Kermit the Frog. His exuberant madness and unconventional clothing (faded jeans, suit vests, colorful top hats) left audiences vulnerable to deception. “What you detect behind everything he does is joy coupled with incredible cunning,” Teller, who acts as the silent half of the magical duo Penn & Teller, said in an interview. (He only remains silent on stage.) “Joy has two functions: it makes you very happy, but it also deactivates some of your critical faculties.” Then the cards would do peculiar things: rearrange their order, change color or suit, or suddenly decide that they had been hearts all along, instead of spades. For some spectators, the experience was so disconcerting that they were ejected from their seats. Wizards found it equally infuriating. “He came to the table with as much skill as any magician who ever lived,” Penn Jillette, Teller’s magic partner, said in an interview, cursing with typical enthusiasm. “He would do a trick for me and I would say, ‘Oh yeah, I have no idea how you did it.'” There was cruelty in Mr. Tamariz. “Juan was willing to do anything to make a trick work,” Mr. Jillette said, emphasizing his point with an insult. Known as the Maestro in his native Spain, where he starred on television variety shows for many years, Mr. Tamariz performed in venues around the world, earning accolades. from magicians like Ricky Jay, David Copperfield and David Blaine. He was a magician’s magician, a philosopher of the trade who described his tricks as “games” rather than “tricks”, a word he found repellent. I didn’t want to fool people; I wanted to share his amazement at the inexplicable. “Without magic, I don’t think I could exist,” he said in “Love and Magic,” an upcoming documentary directed by R. Paul Wilson. “A world without magic would be less rich in emotions, such as illusion or the fulfillment of impossible wishes.” After finishing a trick, ahem, a game, he would strut around playing a violin and shouting the first bar of the opera “Carmen,” which sounded something like, “Yaaaaa! Ya-da-da-da-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up there, playing a violin and shouting the first bar of the opera “Carmen” after finishing a trick, ahem, a game! wrote magician Joshua Jay in “How Magicians Think: Misdirection, Deception, and Why Magic Matters” (2021). “Rodney Dangerfield joked, ‘I don’t get any respect.’ George Burns took a drag on his cigar. Juan plays air fiddle.” Tamariz approached magic like a scientist, experimenting with cards late into the night (it was nocturnal) at a table in his home. He devised theories and techniques that became the intellectual and technical basis of close-up magic. His “false solutions theory” was a way of engineering deception. Care scientists studied it. “During the execution of the trick, it very subtly suggests a possible explanation of how the trick is performed, to finally show at the end that this explanation is not actually possible,” neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga wrote in the journal Current Biology. “By forcing viewers to pay attention to one particular method, you simultaneously force them to ignore many other possible ones.” The cards moved between his long, dexterous fingers in a blur, but his real genius was misdirection, particularly a method he conceived and called “cross-gazing,” in which his hand went in one direction and his gaze in the other, at the same speed. “I think what he will remember most is his psychology, the thinking behind his magic,” said Joshua Jay, the magician, in an interview. “It was very fun to see Juan act, to see the people around him go crazy little by little with what he is doing.” Juan Manuel Tamariz-Martel Negrón was born on October 18, 1942 in Madrid. His father, Julio Tamariz-Martel Fabre, served in the army; His mother, Consuelo Negrón de las Cuevas, was a teacher. As a child I played with magic games and read magic books. When he was 11 or 12, he performed a card trick in front of 200 people at a charity event. It didn’t go well. “I have never been nervous again, neither before nor during a performance,” he said in a 2018 interview with the Spanish cultural magazine Jot Down. “The good thing about art is that if you make a mistake, nothing happens. We have that advantage. If you are a doctor and you make a mistake, someone can die.” He studied physics at the Complutense University of Madrid, but did not finish it. He then attended film school, but that school closed before he could graduate. He devoted himself completely to magic and performed at beach resorts, barely making ends meet. His big break came in 1975. During a meeting at Televisión Española, a public television network, Mr. Tamariz gave the programming director a white knife and then had it dyed red. The director hired him to star in a show called “Magic Time.” Tamariz’s disconcerting games and endearing personality made him a star. Magi from all over the world made pilgrimages to his house, being careful not to arrive before he woke up, usually after 6 p.m. “Juan would make you dinner and you would talk until the last person fell asleep,” Mr. Jillette said. “He would teach you anything you wanted to know. He was open, loving and kind, not the type of person who is a magician in the United States of America.” With his characteristic bravado, Mr. Jillette continued: “John not only taught two, perhaps three, generations of magicians not only how to do magic, but also how to live.” He paused and then added, “I’m going to cry now; I’m sorry. Every one of them is kind and generous and loves life. Do you understand?” What am I saying? “Juan was perhaps the greatest magical genius, certainly in the realm of card magic and sleight of hand, that ever existed, and he found a way to bequeath that to magicians and also to the culture.” In addition to his daughter Ana, his survivors include two other daughters, Mónica Tamariz-Martel Mirêlis and Alicia Tamariz-Martel Nicolau; and a son, Juan Diego Tamariz-Martel López. Tamariz wrote more than a dozen books on magic. In “The Magic Rainbow” (2019), he described his profession as an art that “enchants, pursues, fascinates and excites every layer of the brain, that takes us headlong into mystery, that tells us about desired dreams.” The “universal language” of magic, he wrote, enchants everyone: “Men and women, fools and wise men, intellectuals, artists, scientists and merchants, strippers, aristocrats, lawyers and vagabonds and… and… and…”
