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.
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