Superimposition: Possible States

Superimposition has been around since rock painting.   Layers make up digital graphics.  

As a strategy, superimposition engages how we make sense of visual input?  How much disparate information can we rationalize into a whole?  A line is the accumulation of points, one right after the other.  I am reminded of tendencies to connect dots, to see the line between two points unless the gulf between the points is too wide.  One can interfere with or reaffirm that line.  

Image A on Layer A, space (perhaps infinitesimally small), Image B on Layer B, space, Image C on Layer C, etc..,  perhaps using illusion of depth within one of more of the images to suggest that an image is occupying space below or above its physical (or virtual) layer such that the illusions and the real marks can appear to occupy overlapping space.

Here's an erudite, quite detailed analysis of superimposition by Rob Van Beek: Multiverses: Painting Has a Problem with Superimposed Images.   The focus is a series of paintings, by Geoff Diego Litherland, paintings which superimpose disparate images and set up two dominant layers -- a background and a foreground -- with a gulf in between.

From the pictures, it appears the paintings set up to cleave foreground from background, to separate the two enough to preclude the viewer from automatically filling in the space, that is, to undercut the tendency to project an imaginary line into the gap between two close points.  While its hard from photos on a computer to tell the nuances of connections in the lines and implied directions that make up the disparate backgrounds and foregrounds, it does appear the painter wanted to eliminate perception of an occupied middle space much as a dark line across a faux 3-D form drawn on paper is a tool for destroying illusion of dimensionality.

What of the problem of creating a continuum while maintaining the images as disparate layers? Without setting up complete immersion in the middle space, can superimposed images successfully navigate the gulf they set up between the foreground and background and also continue markedly identify the foreground and the background? 

On a similar note, what of progressively reorienting a three-dimension grid (xyz axis), treating the grid as a layer, in stages through a two dimensional space to render a still frame continuum  that relays movement?