Grep regex NOT containing string

I am passing a list of regex patterns to grep to check against a syslog file. They are usually matching an IP address and log entry;

grep "1\.2\.3\.4.*Has exploded" syslog.log

It’s just a list of patterns like the "1\.2\.3\.4.*Has exploded" part I am passing, in a loop, so I can’t pass “-v” for example.

I am confused trying to do the inverse of the above, and NOT match lines with a certain IP address and error so “!1.2.3.4.*Has exploded” will match syslog lines for anything other than 1.2.3.4 telling me it has exploded. I must be able to include an IP to NOT match.

I have seen various similar posts on StackOverflow. However they use regex patterns that I can’t seem to get to work with grep. Can anyone provide a working example for grep please?

UPDATE:
This is happening in a script like this;

patterns[1]="1\.2\.3\.4.*Has exploded"
patterns[2]="5\.6\.7\.8.*Has died"
patterns[3]="\!9\.10\.11\.12.*Has exploded"

for i in {1..3}
do
 grep "${patterns[$i]}" logfile.log
done