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Eliott Gamer was born in Paris in 1990. A self-taught painter, he developed his drawing practice in animation cinema before dedicating himself to tattooing. The body in motion is conceived as a space reflecting our inner visions: myths, archetypes, spiritual and alchemical symbols. His work summons mysterious figures that guide us to the depths of our inner labyrinth, where the dragon, the ego, and the Minotaur lie dormant. Hands and tormented bodies, often bathed in a divine light.
Painting, drawing, ceramics, writing: these are the various media that allow him to explore different facets of the themes that are dear to him. Each work can be read as a dream, whose interpretation remains intimate and personal.
After several exhibitions in Nantes, Paris, and Belfast, Eliott is currently working in his art studio in Marseille, where he continues to explore his inner worlds.
Hi Eliot! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Marseille?
Eliott: First of all, thank you for offering me this interview. I hope I’ll be able to be as clear and sincere as possible. A normal day always starts with a good hot coffee. It’s impossible for me to do anything before that. I like getting up fairly early and using the beginning of the morning to learn new things, read, meditate, or take care of paperwork. Sometimes a bad habit of doomscrolling sneaks in as well. Then I bike to the studio. Second coffee when I arrive. A day at the studio can look very different, depending on whether I’m starting something new or already deep into a piece. Sometimes I’m very productive and focused; other times I can’t seem to get anything done. But both kinds of days feel important to me, having empty days in the studio is just as much work as painting or reading. The pause is part of the music too. In any case, there’s a third and a fourth coffee. That might be my only constant. Then, when I feel like I’ve reached the end of my day, I leave the studio and go climbing. In the evening, I like to watch a film, a series, or read, and go to bed relatively early.
I’m curious, growing up in Paris, what was life like there? And what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing?
Eliott: Paris is a rather magical and mysterious city in many ways. It’s filled with alchemical symbols, art, and places that make you see the city in a different light. I’ve always loved walking there and getting lost in it. I was quite a shy and nerdy child. I enjoyed being alone, playing video games, reading mangas while sitting on the floor of bookstores, and watching a lot of movies. I hated school, I was afraid of it. One of my kindergarten teachers once went to see my mother, worried because I would talk to my hands during class. I was trying to mentally escape from that place. I enjoyed immersing myself in fantasy worlds; I felt safer there than in the real world. My parents separated when I was about five years old, and the turmoil that followed, I think, somewhat reinforced my tendency toward independence and my love of calm and solitude.
Do you remember approximately at what age your creative side started to show? And when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
Eliott: To be honest, not really! Even though drawing has always been present in my life, I never really thought of myself as an artist or identified as one. I think everything happened step by step. I started going toward animation cinema without really knowing why. At 18, I wasn’t someone who knew what they wanted to do with their life, but my father worked in that field, and I think part of me was seeking validation.
After intense studies in animation and several years working in that industry, I realized that if I continued, I would never develop my own drawing and personal aspirations. I had neither the time nor the energy to do it after work. I was slowly extinguishing myself from the inside. At that time, I was living between Paris and London, and I did a tattoo on myself, thanks to a friend. After that, some people started asking if I could tattoo them, so I quit my job and gave myself one year to be better at tattooing and make enough money to pay my rent with it. And it worked.
This practice later opened up new perspectives on what I was capable of, on the possibility of making a living from drawings, and on being independent. I put back at the center of my life the principle that time is my most precious resource. Those years were very important to me, and I’m grateful to all the people I was able to tattoo then and up to today, my life would be very different without them.
Two years later, we rented a studio with three friends in Pantin near Paris, and I think that’s when the transition to another step happened. Spending time in an art studio “making things » and experimenting with new mediums, I think I had always unconsciously wanted that, and being surrounded by people who had concretely activated it in their lives made me realize I wanted it for myself too. I still don’t know exactly what an artist is. The word seems to have been stretched so much nowadays that it doesn’t really make sense to me. But in recent years, I’ve been trying to find my place in this world and define it for myself.
Ok Eliot, with these next series of questions, I will try to delve into your work as best as possible. So…. You come from animation cinema and tattooing – two practices deeply tied to movement and skin. At what point did the body itself stop being a subject and become a threshold in your work?
Eliott: I’ve always loved drawing the human body, especially through life drawing, which I practiced a lot. For a long time, I drew at home, so on a relatively small scale. When I had an art studio for the first time, I was able to experiment with having space. I remember a period when I was restless, with loud music in my ears, and I started unrolling large sheets of paper on the walls and drawing long lines while standing, creating large hands, then moving in the other direction to make a huge foot, without thinking. I needed to let off steam.
Expressing myself physically in front of others has always made me uncomfortable, and drawing bodies in motion, with my whole own body allowed me to express it in my own way. From there, drawing bodies with exaggerated proportions became central to my work, even today. Beyond the fact that I enjoy drawing the body itself, I usually don’t include clothing because I don’t want the figures to be tied too specifically to a time, a culture, or a gender. I like them to remain mysterious enough for anyone to project themselves onto them, if they wish.
You’ve said that movement gives life, perhaps even more than language. Do you remember a moment when you stopped trusting words and began trusting gesture instead?
Eliott: We’ve been culturally trained to use language in many ways. We pay far more attention to what we say than to what our posture communicates. Even though we’re taught to sit up straight while eating or stand a certain way, the body has a harder time staying aware in small gestures, especially the hands. A hand position can show discomfort or thoughtfulness; a raised finger can suggest gentleness; the tension in the fingers can express joy.
As a child, I spoke with my hands because they’re so expressive, it’s easy to project what you want onto them. Hands are like a small, intimate theater in themselves. The body can reveal multiple intentions at once without contradicting itself. You can watch someone dance silently with a mask and feel incredibly strong emotions. The reverse is also true, but since I was a child, I’ve always been more sensitive to the subtle movements of people than to the words they speak.
You speak of the Minotaur, the dragon, the ego as inner figures we are called to confront. Is there one of these archetypes that has personally haunted you more than the others?
Eliott: These images are all one and the same. It’s the ego. It is the tool that constructs our identity, the “persona” we perform in society, which allows us to interact with the world. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to communicate with others, remember to drink water, or even respond when someone calls our name. The persona is mostly shaped by our reactions to our environment and our interactions during childhood.
But the ego is deeply attached to this identity, and to identification in general. If it’s left free to take control of our psychological functions, everything gets filtered through its lens, turning into rigid rules and a desire to control the outside world. It seeks to repeat pleasure and avoid discomfort, even at the expense of others. Its driving force is the belief that everything should be as it thinks it must be, not as things actually are. “Defeating the dragon or the Minotaur” is a metaphor for confronting the ego and putting it back at its place in our psyche. It can appear terrifying and tyrannical in order to avoid being challenged. Change, opening oneself to the unknown, feels like death to the ego, and this is its deepest fear.
So what do you think it is, about these mythic beings that resinate so well with you
Eliott: These creatures are symbols that lies in our collective unconscious. The dragon, for example, beyond representing the ego (guarding a treasure, proud, speaking cunningly) also embodies the fear of natural disasters: storms, earthquakes, glaciers swallowing people who walk upon them. In alchemy, it represents the prima materia, the raw, chaotic prime matter that we must open to release the light it contains. I find these images fascinating. They are complex, timeless, and appear across all cultures in various forms. Even though they don’t exist objectively, they hold an undeniable inner reality that is shared by all of humanity. They allow me to see the world through a poetic lens and provide clues about the inner forces that move through us.
Your work feels less like storytelling and more like documentation, almost as if you’re recording inner states, forces, or thresholds rather than illustrating ideas. What are the core themes or inner movements you feel compelled to document again and again, and where do you think that compulsion comes from in your own life?
Eliott: That’s an interesting question. For a long time, I thought you needed ideas to illustrate, that having an idea was the starting point for creating something interesting, no matter the field. Like having a good pitch for writing a movie script, for example. The thing is, that never worked for me. Whenever I tried to base my work on “an idea,” the result was always disappointing. For a long time, I thought I just wasn’t creative.
Then I went through a particular period in my life where I started drawing completely automatically, not caring at all about the outcome. And that’s when interesting things started to emerge. I realized that the less control I tried to impose on what I was doing, the more the result seemed to point me in the right direction. The less I tried to impose meaning, the more it appeared naturally.
Following the methods of others wasn’t going to work for me. I needed to find my own process. The word “documentation” feels right, I see it as documenting an inner journey. I start with one element, and the rest unfolds as I go. Most of the time, I don’t know where I’m headed; I just draw what I see along the way. And as it’s an inner journey, I see what resonates with me, what I like to read or to watch.
Your imagery is rich in spiritual and alchemical symbols, yet it resists doctrine. How do you personally navigate spirituality without turning it into belief or system?
Eliott: I come from a family that practices Buddhism. Rituals and philosophy have always played a significant role in my life. For a long time, I practiced Buddhism only lightly, wanting to explore other paths for myself, other ways of approaching these questions. Whether it was other forms of spirituality, philosophy, psychology, or science, I’ve always been curious about anything that seeks to explain the world, no matter the point of view.
Alchemy became a turning point for me. As a philosophy of life, it sits at the crossroads of different fields. Its poetic worldview and beautiful symbolic imagery have been a major source of guidance in many areas of my life. I believe that the more we approach spirituality with a varied vocabulary, the more it can serve as a guide without becoming a rigid system. The danger lies, in my opinion, in dogma. As soon as someone positions themselves between people and spirituality “do as I say because I understand… give me money if you want my guidance…” problems begin. For me, spirituality is a personal journey. We all share the same destination, but there are as many paths to reach it as there are human beings.
You move freely between painting, drawing, ceramics, and writing. What does clay allow you to express that drawing or painting cannot?
Eliott: For me, switching between mediums lets me explore different sides of my creative process. I work in ceramics or writing in much the same way I draw, but each medium requires a slightly different approach, which gives me a fuller perspective. And each one feeds into the others. Sometimes, when I’m drawing, I avoid certain things because I’ve fallen into habits and automatic reflexes. When that happens, I turn to ceramics, or writing, It brings back spontaneity, and I’m no longer stuck in the same questions. For now I focus more on painting and drawing.
Is there a medium that consistently resists you, and if so, do you see that resistance as an obstacle or a guide?
Eliott: Writing has always been something that intimidated me. I love reading, so I was very critical of my own attempts at writing in the past. It’s only in the last year and a half that I started doing it regularly, just for myself, with no particular goal, simply for the pleasure of it. And it has been incredibly rewarding. In recent years, I had developed the bad habit of thinking that everything I do should ultimately be seen by others. But writing simply for the sake of writing, has been surprisingly liberating. It has reminded me that I don’t have to show everything.
When a work fails, what does failure usually mean for you?
Eliott: That’s a difficult question. It’s impossible to say for certain whether a piece of work is a failure. Whether something is “good” or “bad” doesn’t really matter, since it’s a subjective matter. Besides, we’re generally poor judges of our own work. That said, in my own process and personal evaluation, I tend to use this subjective judgment as a kind of compass. When I create something I don’t like, I know that work often has something new to teach me, and it’s worth revisiting it after some time has passed. On the other hand, a piece or an element that I like straight away, often raises questions, it usually signals that I’ve been lazy somewhere in the process or that I’ve tried too hard to please.
You speak of rediscovering an “original inner light.” Was there a time in your life when that light felt lost or inaccessible?
Eliott: Of course. This light is hard to hold onto in this world, it’s always fleeting, always on the edge of being there, but never stays. Sometimes, we awaken for a brief moment and feel a sense of unity with everything. We feel truly present and joyful. Five minutes later, we’re thinking about that bill we forgot to pay, panic comes, and we’re asleep again, symbolically. It’s incredibly frustrating.We often stand in the way of this light ourselves, for all sorts of very human reasons.
Years ago, during a period of exhaustion, I experienced an intense episode of sleep paralysis, during which I saw this inner light, that exists in all of us, no matter what we do. It was a pivotal moment in my life, and it gave me a tremendous sense of hope. I like to bring that idea in my paintings, sometimes they feel dark, but I always try to put a small door for the light to enter.
What part of yourself do you feel you are still avoiding in your work?
Eliott: That’s an easy one: myself! I’m constantly trying to avoid myself, not consciously tho. The hardest part for me is being okay with who I am and what I do, without judgment. Instagram is a really good tool originally, but it messes with my head. I see too many images, really great ones, and I don’t even have time to process them. I have the brain of a squirrel, I see something that I like, and I’m like « this is so good I wish I could do something similar », then I see something completely different and I’m like « oh but this is so good as well I wish I could do something like that also », it’s exhausting. Now I’m just trying to do what feels right for me, to work where it feels natural, not forced, and not what I think others expect.
Do you think art can truly open “a narrow passage toward a new world,”?
Eliott: What I mean is that art, at its best, opens something up within us. It creates doorways to new ways of thinking and seeing the world. It’s a space for personal transformation, and by extension, for anyone who resonates with it. To me, that’s what keeps a society alive. We all have a tendency, on both a small and large scale, toward inertia. We stop questioning what’s happening around us. We settle into habits. When everyone agrees, “This is what’s good,” we need people who remind us that things can be different.
What’s happened in tattooing over the past ten years is a good example of that for me. In France, tattooing used to mean very defined visual codes, and anything outside of that simply wasn’t considered tattooing. Then a generation arrived with completely different backgrounds and cultures, and started experimenting with it.
Fuzi, whom you interviewed, was one of the first to do that in France. He didn’t follow the established standards of what a “good” tattoo was supposed to look like. That opened the door for the rest of us. I remember people saying seven or eight years ago, when they saw our tattoos, “I didn’t even know you could do that with tattooing.” It allowed many artists to make a living from their drawings, to leave jobs that didn’t suit them, and to regain a sense of autonomy. It’s specific, and on a small scale, but to me it’s a strong example of the kind of transformation that can happen when perspective shifts, even slightly.
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
Eliott: It’s usually pretty chaotic. With painting, I start by cutting and stapling the canvases on the wall, then priming. It feels like a kind of opening ritual. Sometimes I begin painting right away, instinctively. But most of the time, the canvas hangs there for days without me touching it. I draw, I circle around it, I hesitate. I walk up to it, then go back to my desk. I pace around, I wait. I look at references. I lose confidence, regain it, then lose it again.
This little cycle goes on until, annoyed with myself, I finally let go and start painting. I also need music, I can’t draw or paint without music. It can drastically guide my mood and what I want to paint. Sometimes the composition comes together all at once. Other times I stop halfway through and have to think about what’s missing. Then the whole cycle begins again, until I reach a point where I no longer feel the need to add or change anything. It’s the same with drawing and every other mediums.
How do you approach color?
Eliott: I’m not very confident with color. I drew in black and white for a long time, and color felt like a fascinating but unfamiliar world to me. When I finally started experimenting with painting, it was as if I had opened a massive door in my mind that I had never dared to explore. It felt like learning how to draw all over again. I love that. I’m actually glad I don’t have a technical background in color, because it means I can experiment and search with my own eyes. I usually look at painters or images I’m drawn to and try to understand why one color works with another for me. Then I try, and try again, until my own sensitivity begins to emerge.
So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?
Eliott: I often struggle to know where I’m headed, or whether what I’m doing has any real value. But as I mentioned earlier, many artists and friends, across different fields have had a profound impact on my life and helped me move forward, one step at a time. They gave me hope, encouraged me to experiment, and deepened my understanding of the world and of what might be possible in a life.
We’re living through a pretty scary period of humanity. We see people turning to hatred instead of being kind to one another, closing their doors instead of welcoming differences, believing in theories that divide people and step on minorities instead of recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to stop a handful of people from getting everything they want. My paintings are not going to change anything, but just as others did for me, I hope that, in time, my work might offer someone a small step forward too.
Outside of art, what’s something you’re obsessed with right now—maybe a hobby, a show, or even a food—that keeps you grounded or inspired?
Eliott: Climbing has become an important part of my life, for many different reasons. Beyond the obvious benefits of physical wellbeing and spending more time in nature, it’s what I get from it philosophically that made me so passionate about it.
I mainly practice sport climbing, so climbing with a rope and a belayer. You’re completely relying on someone else, which builds a kind of bond and trust that I find very meaningful. But it’s also powerful to move forward with someone, not against something, not for any practical reason, but simply to push each other through a shared personal experience. Climbing is for me, not a way of winning anything, but going back to a place where you have to be fully present, despite of fear, in order to enjoy the beauty and the adventure. The experience, the « doing » itself, is the purpose. It is a feeling that I try to return to when I paint.
Anybody you look up to?
Eliott: I’ve been influenced in recent years by the work of Miriam Cahn. It was her work that pushed me to start painting three years ago, after seeing her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I find her activism, her use of color, her installations, and the freedom in the way she approaches the body and backgrounds really inspiring. I hope that one day my work might carry a similar strength. I would also like to mention my mother, whose courage and subtle intelligence have always been a guiding light for me.
Alright Eliott, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Eliott: Hmmm, I always find that question difficult because I don’t have a favorite movie. I love so many movies for so many different reasons. In my recent views, I got really struck by the cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda, a Japanese director. And specifically Monster (Kaibutsu). I love how he wright his characters, and how they unfold during his movies.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Eliott: Recently listening to some Eartheater, Blood Orange, and some video games OST like NieR:Automata.