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MIHAI RAUȚĂ

MIHAI RAUȚĂ

Exhibition “XeX LIBRIS”

Mihai is a conceptual artist who uses photography as meditation.

Trained as a chemical engineer but always an artist, explorer, and entrepreneur at heart, he began his creative journey experimenting with, developing and publishing short science fiction stories with one of the oldest science fiction clubs in Romania—“String”-. 

Then, as a post-revolutionary Romania opened to the world, he worked and helped build and develop advertising and public relations campaigns for some of the country’s first international publishing agencies. 

Ever hungry for adventure, he later spent time exploring the world as a lone backpacker before bringing his passion for creative problem solving to a career in the financial industry, completing an EMBA and leading large teams as a Retail Risk Director for two major international banks. Here, he introduced his “Friday Fun” concept to the corporate environment, organizing more than 50 events aimed at bringing creative expression and play to places that traditionally lack it. 

His photographic encounters are spontaneous—the majority occur during short early morning or late evening walks in Bucharest with Busy, his happy-go-lucky Jack Russel Terrier.

6 years ago, inspired by a course he took with New Age Photography, he started to study first through observation and then through his photographs, the mute flight of Bucharest’s wild city birds. This exploration and mindful observation of birds among the city lights led him to his Phoenix nest, a space where his imagination and his creative vision merged into one reality—the smoking ashes of a burned-down nightclub. Here, on scorched earth and among twisted metal, he found new meaning to the freedom he sought among the birds. This space and this moment yielded the manifest photo story “XeX Libris” (2022), an ode to Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du Mal”Bukowski’s “Love for $17.50” and Bradbury’s“Fahrenheit 451”.

“I’m not a photographer, nor an artist”.

I just …AM. 

I am present, conscious in the moment that floods my subconscious with the very existence of everything! 

I share with the viewer moments captured in daily life and hope they find within them “ A reset button” that will remove them from the urban, corporate, family cliches that we are surrounded by daily and will give them  space to grow anew.”