A Patron and an Artist

Long-time Doha resident Patric Rozario is an artist who creates singular art and a huge body of his work is currently on display at one of the popular luxury hotel properties in Doha, Intercontinental – The City.

There are countless luxury properties that solicit artists’ works. The work that the luxury properties curate resonates with their management’s vision and underscores the visual narrative of its interiors.

“Intercontinental- The City had a pre-Rozario and a post-Rozario period; one that was void of much art and later when this artist’s creative colours splashed our walls.”

Gilles Longuet
General Manager
Intercontinental- The City
Doha

In that sense Intercontinental – The City, Doha is no different. It has artwork strewn across its walls, some in sweet disarray and some in perfect symphony with its interiors. But there the similarity culminates. For, here, the spotlight is completely on one artist and his entire oeuvre of work. The artist in focus here is Patric Rozario, a self-made creator with a portfolio of work that is quite rare. A long-time resident of Doha, Rozario has carved a niche for himself with his style that has matured to become distinctive as experience has firmed his skills.

But like any artist, his work is also a result of a benefactor who helped him nurture his work. The patron here is  Intercontinental – The City, Doha, represented by the General Manager, Gilles Longuet, who describes his association with Rozario, thus, “Intercontinental – The City had a pre-Rozario and a post-Rozario period, one that was void of art and later when this artist’s creative colours splashed our walls.”

“We wanted to redo the entire reception of the residential area of the Hotel and when I saw what Rozario was doing, I thought that this would be the perfect fit for the property,” he says, “The art was the defining part of the reception and the design was as a result of the art.”

Longuet, who has over 40 years’ experience in the hotel industry across 15 different countries including 15 years in the Middle East, says, “I have met many artists in my long association with the hotel industry, we had a few international artists whose work were shown here at the Hotel but I would not choose any of them because what I wanted was someone who had a different perspective, a unique talent, an originality that I found only in Rozario’s work.”

“The best expression of this hotel is the first impression one has as one enters the residential suites where a large five-meter wide creation of Rozario’s (Artistic Metal Panel) take center stage. “We are planning the refurbishment of the main entrance and Rozario will be part of this new activity too”, added Longuet.

Close to 65 works of this artist flourish the walls of the Hotel, of which the most eye-catching one is that which is framing the reception table of the residential suite, the one that Longuet mentions. In bright flaming orange, the metal cladding with exquisite pearls and semi-precious stones embedded in its acrylic hues and folds catch the setting sun and fills the corridors of the hotel with a certain streak that is captivating in its intensity.

“We always try to support the artist in every domain; it could be a musician, sculpture, or painter,” he says. “It is not the General Manager that makes a good hotel; it is the people, the art, the content within the Hotel that makes its mark, and that is the soul of the property.”

For someone who realised that everything that he saw in the world was designed, Rozario had a career that was dotted with struggle with occasional commissions that gave him an impetus to keep trying hard until he found his creative voice or medium. In his periods of struggle, Rozario has an interesting story of his association with the legendary painter, M.F. Hussain, with whom he used to have a mentor-mentee association, who also passed on one invaluable lesson, “Of consistently trying hard, of not giving up, of pursuing your strengths and to keep experimenting till one finds your own unique style,” he recounts.

The accidental moment when he found his niche was when a sole pearl dropped on an acrylic painting that was in the process of being completed, making him see the beauty of that foreign body on the blob of chemical, paving way for his new style of art known as Artistic Metallic Panels.

By hand-painting on aluminium panels and then sprinkling pearls, semi-precious gems, and Swarovski crystals, before sealing it all in with a coat of Epoxy Resin, Rozario created a world of his own within these canvases, one that is colourful and glimmering, at once opulent and yet subdued in its exuberance. Almost like the artist himself, who impresses us with his bouts of creativity and marketing skills and then withdraws within a quiet shell as if to recuperate his creative skills.

Rozario has different painting series that are exhibited at Intercontinental – The City, one is called the ‘Cloud Dance’ wherein he focuses on Doha landmarks with a cloud dance on top of each of them. Another series of work called ‘View of Earth from Above’ was inspired by satellite images of earth, over which he painted with different paint materials. “Solvent based and water-based paint repels and rejects each other, and this creates beautiful patterns. This is just one of the techniques I use. Gems and tumbled rocks are used to accentuate ridges, hills and mountains. Metaphorically, time and experience wash or blow away less important parts of us. Slowly the gems of our character and profile emerge and shine, and this is what I wanted to portray, “says Rozario.

Forty-five paintings of these series grace the walls of The Square restaurant. These bejeweled paintings can be purchased as well from this setting through the Hotel. In unique colours ranging from purple to lilac, light pinks to blues, Rozario’s works take center stage here, in numerous ways, one by their sheer number and another for the absolute brilliance of semi-precious stones and the panorama they epitomize.