The bit in the article about Escher being approached by Kubrick to work on "2001"- that would have been quite the Chang rig he had said yes. I always felt the abstract visualizations at the end of the film lacking something. While it's fairly obvious that Bowman is going through something formless and indescribable, trading it for the surreal visual vocabulary of Escher would have made an much more memorable statement.
Not so sure. Escher's worlds strike me as locally coherent and tidy if globally impossible (as a commenter remarks above). My interpretation of the end of 2001 suggests that everything was being chaotically dismantled.
