I never met Juan Tamariz in person, nor do I disbscribe myself as a devoted student to his magic. Still, his name has always been there, almost from the beginning.
My own philosophy of magic has probably grown closer to the Ascanio school of thought, later coloured by Gabi Pareras’ ‘Fictional Magic’ and, perhaps a sprinkle of ideas found in The Jerx. If anything, Juan has always remained slightly offset from my own path.
Still, his presence was always there.
Essential Magic Conference 2010 (EMC) provides a gateway into a world which I had only encountered in fragments. I remember attending the live stream and seeing magicians such as Eric Mead, Dani DaOrtiz, Helder Guimarães and Miguel Ángel Gea perform. None of those names were familiar to me at the time, and yet there was something different in the way they approached and thought about magic.
As I began to seek out more of their work, the connection to Juan became increasingly apparent.
In their books, videos, interviews, lectures and conversations, Juan’s name was referenced again and again. The further I followed their work, the harder Juan became to ignore.
Looking back, EMC 2010 was probably less a turning point in my own philosophy than my first glimpse of a much larger conversation around the Spanish school of magic, one that I would only begin to understand years later.
Roberto Giobbi’s book Ask Roberto includes an essay on the Escuela Mágica de Madrid, a magic school co-founded by Juan Tamariz, Arturo de Ascanio, Juan Antón, Camilo Vázquez and others. Roberto’s essay helped me put much of this into context, giving a name and structure to what I had only been noticing indirectly.
The EMM was not a school in the conventional sense, but a school of thought built around the belief that magic deserved the same theoretical and artistic consideration given to other arts. Its members were concerned with psychology, communication, construction, structure, performance and spectator’s experience.
That matters to me because it puts Juan in a different landscape from simply being a great magicians with a collection of influential books.
Another important milestone came later through Helder Guimarães’ Quarterly, Vol. 3 & Vol. 4, where Gabi Pareras’ ideas on Fictional Magic were first introduced in the English-speaking community by Roberto Mansilla.
Gabi proposed a conception of magic that, in some ways, sits in tension with Tamariz’s The Magic Way. Rather than constantly reinforcing the reality of the conditions surrounding an impossibility, Fictional Magic allowed another possibility: that the performance could construct its own reality, its own fiction, within which the magic existed.
If anything, Gabi’s concept of Fictional Magic gave Juan’s philosophy much more weights and sharper definition. The contrast showed just how complete The Magic Way was.
Perhaps my first real encounter with Juan’s work on the written page came through Fred Robinson’s magazine Pabular, Vol. 4, No. 3. Within those pages was the earliest pieces of Tamariz’s magic to appear in an English-language publication: “The Oil and Water of Tamariz.”.
Below was Fred’s own words, as extracted from Pabular, Vol. 4 No. 7.
Robinson was particularly proud of having written this piece, and it is not difficult to see why. The resulting write-up is remarkably complete. Even something as minor as how the cards are squared receives careful attention.
To this date, the write-up remains one of the most comprehensive studies of a single magic effect I have ever read, and a remarkable glimpse into the richness of Juan’s philosophy.
With his passing on August 18, 2026, magic has lost one of its last maestros, if not the last figure capable of connecting the old world of magic with the one we now inhabit.
A custodian of what came before.
A teacher to those who followed.
And, above all, a student of magic who never appeared satisfied that the art had already discovered what it could become.
The fraternity feels much smaller without him.
Thank you for once being here, and for leaving magic better than you found it.
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