Juan Tamariz, a zany, shaggy-haired, snaggletoothed magician whose ingenious card tricks baffled audiences and stumped other sleight-of-hand practitioners, earning him mythic stature as the world’s pre-eminent master of close-up magic, died on Aug. 18 in Madrid. He was 83.
The cause of death, at a hospital, was sepsis, his daughter Ana Tamariz said. He also had Parkinson’s disease.
Self-deprecating, with energy that bordered on mania, Mr. Tamariz was a little bit of Woody Allen shuffled with Gilbert Gottfried and Kermit the Frog. His exuberant nuttiness and unconventional attire — faded jeans, suit vests, colorful top hats — left audiences vulnerable to deception.
“What you detect behind everything he does is joy coupled with unbelievable cunning,” Teller, who performs as the silent half of the magic duo Penn & Teller, said in an interview. (He is silent only onstage.) “The joy has two functions: It makes you very happy, but it also disables some of your critical faculties.”
Then cards would do peculiar things — rearrange their order, change color or suits or suddenly decide that they had been hearts, rather than spades, all along.
To some spectators, the experience was so bewildering that they were driven from their seats. Magicians found him equally exasperating.
“He came to the table with as many skills as any magician who has ever lived,” Penn Jillette, Teller’s magic partner, said in an interview, cursing with his typical gusto. “He would do a trick for me, and I would say to him, ‘Oh, yeah, I have absolutely no idea how you just did that.’”
There was a ruthlessness to Mr. Tamariz.
“Juan was willing to do anything to make a trick work,” Mr. Jillette said, emphasizing his point with an expletive.
Known as the Maestro in his native Spain, where he starred in television variety shows for many years, Mr. Tamariz performed at venues around the world, winning acclaim from magicians like Ricky Jay, David Copperfield and David Blaine.
He was a magician’s magician, a philosopher of the craft who described his sleights as “games” rather than “tricks” — a word he found repellent. He didn’t want to fool people; he wanted to share in their awe of the inexplicable.
“Without magic, I don’t think I could exist,” he said in “Love and Magic,” a forthcoming 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 an air violin and shouting the first measure of the opera “Carmen,” which sounded something like, “Yaaaa! Ya-da-da-da-da-daaaaaaaaa!”
“It’s an applause cue, a message to the audience that something is ending and something else is about to begin,” the magician Joshua Jay wrote in “How Magicians Think: Misdirection, Deception and Why Magic Matters” (2021). “Rodney Dangerfield quipped, ‘I don’t get no respect.’ George Burns took a drag from his cigar. Juan plays the air violin.”
Mr. Tamariz approached magic like a scientist, experimenting with cards late into the night — he was nocturnal — at a table in his home. He devised theories and techniques that became the intellectual and technical bedrock of close-up magic.
His “theory of false solutions” was a way to engineer deception. Scientists who specialize in attention studied it.
“During the execution of the trick, he suggests in a very subtle way a possible explanation of how the trick is being performed, to eventually show at the very end that this explanation is in fact not possible,” the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga wrote in the journal Current Biology. “By forcing the spectators to pay attention to a particular method, he is at the same time forcing them to disregard many other possible ones.”
Cards moved through his long, dexterous fingers in a blur, but his true genius was misdirection, particularly a method that he conceived and called “crossing the gaze,” in which his hand would go one way and his gaze the other — at the same speed.
“I think what he’ll be remembered for most is his psychology, the thinking behind his magic,” Joshua Jay, the magician, said in an interview. “It made it so much fun to watch Juan perform, to watch the people around him just slowly go insane with what he’s doing.”
Juan Manuel Tamariz-Martel Negrón was born on Oct. 18, 1942, in Madrid. His father, Julio Tamariz-Martel Fabre, served in the military; his mother, Consuelo Negrón de las Cuevas, was a teacher.
As a boy, he played with magic sets 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 did not 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 fail, someone can die.”
As a teenager, he was mentored by magicians at the Spanish Society of Illusionism. He studied physics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, but didn’t finish. He then attended film school, but that school shut down before he could graduate.
Turning to magic full time, he performed at beach resorts, barely making ends meet.
His big break came in 1975. During a meeting at Televisión Española, a public TV network, Mr. Tamariz handed the programming director a white pocketknife and then made it turn red. The director hired him to star in a show called “Magic Time.”
Mr. Tamariz’s baffling games and endearing personality made him a star. Magicians from around the world made pilgrimages to his home, being careful not to arrive before he woke up, usually after 6 p.m.
“Juan would cook you supper, and you would talk until the last person there fell asleep,” Mr. Jillette said. “He would teach you anything you wanted to know. He was open and loving and kind — not the kind of person that’s a magician in the United States of America.”
With his characteristic bravado, Mr. Jillette kept going: “Juan not only taught two, maybe three, generations of magicians not just how to do magic, but also how to live: He paused, then added, “I’m going to cry now; I’m sorry. Every single one of them is kind and generous and loves life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The Maestro turned Spain into the epicenter of close-up magic — a distinction that has become a kind of running joke on the television show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which magicians try to fool the seemingly undeceivable hosts.
“When the Spaniards come on ‘Fool Us,’ Penn and I just go, ‘OK, get ready to bring down the trophy,’” Teller said. “Juan was perhaps the biggest magical genius, certainly in the realm of card magic and sleight of hand, who ever lived, 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.
Mr. Tamariz wrote more than a dozen books about magic.
In “The Magic Rainbow” (2019), he described his profession as an art that “enchants and haunts and fascinates and excites every layer of the brain, that brings us headfirst into mystery, that speaks to us of desired dreams.”
Magic’s “universal language,” he wrote, charms everyone: “Men and women, foolish and wise, intellectuals, artists, scientists and merchants, strippers, aristocrats and lawyers and tramps and … and … and …”
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