Born on July 6, 1971, of Swiss nationality,  Fabien Ballif has a studio in Cossonay and live in Ferreyres. As a child, he dabbled a lot in drawing, winning first prize at secondary school at the age of 16. he abandoned pencils for elite sport, taking up ski jumping and cross-country skiing from 1982 to 1992; a commercial employee, he changed direction in 1998 and trained as a professional actor; he practiced this profession from 2001 to 2010 and returned to pictorial creation at the end of 2009. He also qualified as a massage therapist in 2009; since then,  he has been giving massages and energy treatments, alongside his creative work. From 2010 to 2012,  he explored pastel, pencil, collage and acrylic. For him, it’s a question of finding his identity and knowing what he want to convey through  his art. Particularly inspired by the abstract work of Gerhard Richter, he developed a similar technique;  he chose the acrylic medium and exhibited for the first time in 2012 at Gallery Nelly L’Eplattenier in Lausanne.Between 2012 and 2023, he take part in over 40 group and solo exhibitions, mostly in galleries in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Although he loves figurative painting, he is more attracted to lyrical abstraction or abstract expressionism, with a  strong interest in the Franco-Chinese artists Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh Chun and Wang Yan Cheng, the late work of Monet, and Mark Rothko. He is training in oil painting in 2019 with Rafael Barria, a Chilean painter living in his region. The following year he took a private course on pigments and tempera with Swiss artist Barbara Bonvin. From then on, he creates some of the mineral pigments he uses for his temperas, and build his own wooden canvases to the sizes he want. After more than two years of tempera work, he is now investigating the field of abstract and semi-abstract creation in oil. Today, over 180 of my works live on in private and public collections in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Poland, Australia, Canada and Mexico.