How to Stir Imagination So It Doesn’t Break — Estrada at the MUCAC

We live bullet-point lives. Constantly asked to optimize ourselves, to back our decisions with data, to make sense of everything before we even allow ourselves to move.

We ask logic to decide who we love, when to leave, which dreams are realistic, which paths are acceptable, which longings are allowed to stay. We gather information, analyze, compare, and wait for certainty.

And when certainty takes too long to arrive — as it often does — we promptly reach for ChatGPT. Surely such an extraordinary intelligence must know what is best for us.

And so, without quite realizing it, we postpone life itself. We think ourselves through things instead of living them, all in the name of logic.

It’s against this backdrop that an exhibition currently unfolding at MUCAC La Coracha feels almost rebellious. Its title reads like a reminder we didn’t know we needed:

Cómo batir la imaginación para que no se corte.​
​How to stir imagination so it doesn’t break.

More than 150 works — paintings, drawings, sculpture, poetry, film, archives — gather in six “constellations” of thought and feeling, all orbiting the creative universe of Rafael Pérez Estrada (1934–2000), one of Málaga’s most singular voices.

Sometimes gently — with hand-shaped doves that blur the line between gesture and flight — sometimes mischievously, through drawings where objects think, words behave like images, and meaning refuses to stay put, Estrada defies the idea that life can be fully filtered through logic.

That everything meaningful must make sense.
That every choice must be supported by data.
That every feeling must be rationalized before it’s allowed to exist.

Walking through the rooms, it’s hard not to feel how countercultural this stance has become.

Estrada doesn’t reject logic. He simply refuses to crown it king. His imagination doesn’t aim to explain the world. It aims to expand it. To make room for paradox, mystery, and insight as legitimate ways of knowing.

One of the exhibition’s quiet through-lines is this reminder: not everything essential arrives as a fact. Some truths arrive as images, as sensations, as sentences that don’t resolve neatly, but linger.

Estrada was both a lawyer and a prolific creator. A central yet unmistakably idiosyncratic figure in Málaga’s cultural life. Rooted in surrealism, he moved easily between poetry, drawing, aphorism, and visual play. He treated imagination not as an escape from reality, but as a way of inhabiting it.

The exhibition doesn’t try to explain him neatly. Instead, it invites you to enter his way of seeing—a way of moving through the world where not everything needs to be justified, proven, optimized, or resolved into a conclusion.

And Estrada’s imagination doesn’t live in isolation. The show places his work in conversation with voices across time and style: from the Mediterranean surrealism of Picasso’s Faunos y flora de Antibes, to the poetry of Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti; from the metaphysical currents of María Zambrano to the experiments of Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró. These are fellow wanderers of perception, reminding us, again and again, that reality can be read in many languages.

Alongside them, the exhibition brings together the work of nineteen Málaga-based artists whose practices resonate with Estrada’s sensibility. From figurative painters of the 1980s like Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Chema Cobo, Ángel Luis Calvo-Capa, Patricia Gadea, and Daniel Muriel, to contemporary voices such as Pilar Albarracín, Leandro Erlich, and Leonor Serrano Rivas.

Estrada writes these not as puzzles to solve but as doors into possibility.

And perhaps this is why the exhibition feels so timely. Because many of us are exhausted from trying to live lives that are entirely reasonable. Entirely justified. Entirely defensible. We sense that something in us is being overruled by spreadsheets, strategies, and endless thinking.

Estrada offers another posture: What if not knowing isn’t a failure, but a fertile state? What if some questions are meant to be lived, not pre-emptively resolved?

To “stir imagination so it doesn’t break” is about staying with an idea, a desire, an intuition long enough for it to reveal what it’s becoming, without cutting it short with premature logic.

Especially now, as AI begins to handle much of the logical work for us, we may finally allow something older and wilder back into the room: imagination, intuition, and the courage to trust what feels true before it can be proven.

Logic is excellent at rehearsing the past. It works with what has already happened and projects it forward. Imagination and intuition, on the other hand, have access to the new.

The exhibition invites you to remember another way of being human, one where logic and imagination, intellect and intuition, walk hand in hand.

If you find yourself craving permission to trust what doesn’t yet make sense…
If you’re tired of asking logic to explain your longing…
If you suspect that not everything meaningful will arrive as a plan…

This is an exhibition worth wandering.

Visiting Info​
​Cómo batir la imaginación para que no se corte — Constelaciones en torno a Rafael Pérez Estrada​
📍MUCAC La Coracha, Espacios Cinco y Seis (Paseo de Reding, 1, Málaga)
🗓Until 15 March 2026​
⏰Tue–Sun, 10:00–20:00​
💫 Guided tours available most Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays

Love from Málaga,
Val

p.s. Yes, the sculpture Ave Quiromántica (2001) by José Seguiri — the bronze you see on Calle Bolsa in Málaga city center — is based on an original drawing by Rafael Pérez Estrada. Now you know.