BRUSSELS — The 29-year-old French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou has had an eventful early career. A piece in which he projected Bible and Koran verses onto his naked body caused a scandal in Morocco without even being shown in the country (shortly before the artist's other works were displayed at the 2011 Marrakech Art Fair, local media voiced outrage over the piece, illustrating articles with images of only the Koranic part of the 2010 diptych, “Koranic Inlay”). And his installation “Cocktail or Self-Portrait in Society,” in which Lahlou’s oft-worn red high heels stand on a prayer rug, also caused some outrage.

The two works hit on several sensitive issues in Muslim culture: the prohibition on modifying one’s body, nudity, sexuality, and improper use of the Koran and religious objects. Today, the artist thinks that if he had omitted the holy verses from his penis, the controversy might have been a minor one. “Even in Morocco, many people wanted me to come back after the controversy. I’ve kept a bit of distance for now, because I don’t think I should add fuel to the fire. My thinking about my work has been a bit affected, but I’m not throwing in the towel. I’m picking it up again in a different way.”

On a Sunday afternoon in Brussels, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou arrived to meet ARTINFO France on an old scooter. He is easily recognizable from his big smile and because of his habit of depicting himself in his art — wearing a hijab with a watermelon on his head, or eating a banana with the Koran balanced on his head. He molds his body to create busts, or, in the case of “Salât, ou Autoportrait Dirigé” (“Salât, or Directed Self-Portrait”) (2011), to create nine white plaster figures in prayer position — displayed recently at the “Unlimited Bodies” exhibition at Paris’s Palais de l’Iéna.

With his loose combination of religious iconography and incongruous objects, the ambiguous humor in Lahlou’s work is often misunderstood. But his approach is never casual — rather it blurs the boundaries between personal commentary on his subjects alongside artistic thought.

“I’m not an activist shouting. I am truly respectful of religions and beliefs, except when they kill or hurt people,” Lahlou explains. “As a person, I have a political opinion, I take a position or I don’t. But in my work, I don’t want it to be like that. I want people to be in an awkward position and not know what’s happening, whether it’s humor or reality, true or false. I lean toward being stupid [in my work] because I don’t want to make people think that I am saying bad things. You can have criticisms, but that doesn’t mean that you’re against something. You can have fun with everything — but can you really have fun with everything?”

Lahlou was born in a seaside town on France’s Atlantic coast to a Muslim father, a jeweler, and a Catholic mother, a flamenco dancer. Having grown up in France and Morocco, he was raised with dual traditions that he considers rich though sometimes problematic. Though Catholicism doesn’t openly discuss the pleasures of the flesh, it does allow for nudity and religious ecstasy — “not a pleasure between flesh, but a pleasure with God,” Lahlou explains. Whereas in Islam, the body and God have no intermediary.

His series of Madonnas, “It’s More Sexy or Vierge à l’Enfant” (“It’s More Sexy or Virgin With Child”), 2010, layers mosaics from the Muslim world over paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and other Old Masters. Through December 23, Lahlou’s installation “Construction Cubique ou la Pensée Confuse” (“Cubic Construction or Confused Thought”) is on view in a square in La Louvière as part of an exhibition by the Musée Ianchelevici. At the center of the cube is a Madonna, which replaces the Muslim image Lahlou had initially planned, upon request from the mayor’s office to change it in order not to offend voters.

As seems appropriate for an artist living and working in Belgium, Surrealism has helped Lahlou defuse his initial ideas of dogmatic commentary on religion and cultures. His first artwork, made in 2009, was titled “Ceci N’est Pas Une Femme Musulmane.” “Everything I create is false. The image is not real. That’s why I associate myself somewhat with Surrealism, the question of the fabulous, and the attainable utopia — but in the end it’s utopia, and therefore unattainable. In the fabulous, there is humor.” Art critic and author Christine Vuegen has called this approach “Lahloutopia.”

Lahlou’s essential poetry lies in his video performances. There, he operates between endurance and transcendence, meditation and mediation, taking advantage of his training as a dancer. The body has become his artistic tool, which in itself makes a statement beyond image and aesthetics.

In performance pieces, he’ll belly-dance in high heels while breaking teacups, as the audience throws couscous. In 2009, he walked the 18.5 miles between Mechelen and Antwerp in his signature red heels, a nine-hour journey during which his appearance in little villages brought people out of their houses. “There were old women saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re my hero, look at my heels, they’re much shorter and they hurt a lot.’ Then there were North African men who ran after me and insulted me, and other Arabs who were happy.” Lahlou repeated the performance in Venice for the 2011 Biennale.

“Having your arms in the air for seven hours — I’m telling you, at the end, you have to go see a physical therapist, your back is out,” the artist says. For the performance “Devout with the Niqab” (2011) in the south of France, he put on a niqab (a cloth with which some Muslim women veil their faces) and then kept up ecstatic movement seven hours a day for three days, in temperatures that reached 110 degrees in the sun. “There was also the problem of dehydration, of martyrdom, but what was important to me was really the question of endurance. I really question the stupidity of endurance or stupid endurance.”