Smartwatches are wearable devices of emerging mobile technology and are increasingly in people's daily lives. They allow you to perform various tasks; however, the interaction with these devices still proves to be a significant challenge. Several studies carried out interaction studies with smartwatches using gesture recognition. Thus, this work presents a comprehensive Systematic Review of Literature (SRL) on interaction with smartwatches using gesture recognition, showing what has already been developed and what is state of the art. We searched in four databases with relevant scientific scope: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Science Direct, and Scopus. Work on this theme is diverse; gesture recognition is used to perform operations on smartwatches itself or even control other devices or virtual environments. We hope that this work will provide a rich base on the methods developed and that it will become a source of research for future researchers and that can support the development of other methods and applications.