His early approach to Freud and his following of the French avant-garde turned him towards positions closer to surrealism.
A crucial element in this process was the stay of Dalí and Gala in Torremolinos (April-May 1930), whose landscape contributed to set the raving, paranoiac-critical view expressed by the painter in the literary and artistic work that he then made (El hombre invisible and La femme visible). Nevertheless, Prados-as he would declare some years later – considered "Surrealism as a moral, not an aesthetic actitude." From then on, he plunged into a frantic surreal activity together with the group of youngsters around him (Tomás García, José Luis Cano, and Darío Carmona, among others). A good example of this phase is the series of 19 poems that he wrote then with an automatic technique that simultaneously reveal the homoerotic inclination of the writer, a cause of his frequent sentimental crises.

The result of this atmosphere in Torremolinos was the Exquisite Corpse made by Prados, Gala, Dalí, Cano, and Carmona. In 1930, he also drew the series Dibujos eróticos, twelve erotic drawings. Two years later he produced a series of collages following Max Ernst's techniques and those published in the journals that he received in Malaga. These pieces unfortunately disappeared during the war. The set was completed with a woodcut that Prados made in 1923, published as the cover of the third issue of the journal Ambos.

Prados’ circle of painters and those connected to his activities

The workshop that Prados installed in Malaga, in the Palacio de los Condes de Buenavista (his father’s furniture factory), was the school that trained some of his friends, including Darío Carmona and Jorge Ravassa Masoliver, active members of the Malaga branch of the Free Association of Artists during the Republic.

The early interest of the members of the Malaga group in Surrealism was shown in their contributions published in the last issues of Litoral, in their increasing contacts with the Catalan surrealist journals initiated through Dalí, and in their the relationship with the painter Ángel Planells and critic Joan Ramón Masoliver. Adriano del Valle’s collages created around that period were also influenced by Surrealism, the artistic trend that Prados followed at the time.